High Country

by Nevada Barr

  “Phil?”

  She’d stayed too long. One last look around the camp let her know her welcome was long worn out. Leaning heavily on the ax, she limped away, keeping to the more treacherous but less trackable granite humps where shoulders of stone broke through the thin mantle of earth.

  “Phil? What the fuck?”

  The words followed her into the trees. A part of her that was still young, strong and unhurt, the Huckleberry Finn soul of every woman who has dreamed of hiding in the choir loft and watching her own funeral, wanted to stay and watch the fun as Mark explored the carnage she’d left. The old cynical part of her that just wanted to stay alive kept her walking, each step slow, short and painful.

  “God damn son-of-a-bitch motherfucker,” shot over her head, an expletive missile.

  Anna smiled. It was good to have one’s work appreciated.

  Away from the lake, again in the trees, she was forced to use the stolen flashlight. With her injured ankle, no stars or moon, her compass gone, she didn’t dare try a cross-country adventure. The trail was a trough of India ink running along the floor of a lightless tunnel. Until nearer dawn it would be impossible to follow without a light If the gods were good, there wasn’t a second flashlight tucked away in the tent. Anna doubted they were that good. She’d already strained their generosity with her raid. With gods it was a bad juju to push one’s luck.

  Two good legs had led Anna to remember the trail as far less rugged than it was. Patches of comparatively easy walking on dirt trails were broken by long passages over rock, sometimes smooth as ice, other times shattered into erstwhile steps of varying heights, widths and sharpness. Her geriatric shuffles through the woods seemed a breakneck pace compared with the creeping and scooting, much of it on her rear end, required to cross the granite expanses.

  Traverses that had been so easy as to be forgotten in health and sunlight became treacherous and exhausting. Every misstep was punished by nauseating pain. By fiveA .M. her flashlight was browning out and she was so tired just breathing was a chore. Her legs shook and her knees gave way every three or four yards, forcing her to stop or fall. Without rest she wouldn’t make it, not another mile, not another fifty yards. It was an hour or more till dawn.

  Sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the trail, she began to cry. The only ray of sunshine in the whole miserable, cold, pain-filled universe was that there was no one to see her doing it. Tears sapped the last of her energy. She could feel herself falling asleep where she sat, but she was unable to do anything about it. On some level she knew to sleep was to die, knew in the pack she had never abandoned though its little weight had taken on the weight of the world, was a sleeping bag that would keep her alive. She simply couldn’t find the wherewithal to stand and pull it out, crawl into it.

  Soon,she thought.Just let me sit here another minute, then I’ll do it.

  And she slept.

  Ironically, her life was saved by the grim reaper in yet another of his many guises. A fury of pain shot up from her ankle and a rough voice growled: “You dead? You’re gonna be.”

  Anna hated irony.

  She opened her eyes and was instantly blinded by the light of a flash trained on her face. Instinctively she threw up her arm to shade her face. It was batted away by a fist of ice and bone.

  Her wits coalesced quickly, adrenaline winning over cold and fatigue.

  “Mark,” she said. “What brings you here?”

  He laughed then, standing there unshaven, looking immense in a down jacket, his feet wrapped in socks and shirts and God knew what else. “You’re a freaky bitch.”

  He would shoot her now and hike out on his Sasquatch paws, climb in his red SUV and disappear back into whatever urban hole he’d crawled out of. In a day, maybe two, Lorraine’s rangers would become suspicious about Anna’s rental car parked at the trailhead. Someone would be sent up to find her corpse, frozen and bloody, sprawled in the trail. The account of her demise would be detailed in the Ranger Report and e-mailed to every National Park in the country.

  “What a drag,” she murmured.

  “You got that right.”

  A second passed. Two. He didn’t shoot. There must be a reason for the delay. A tiny spark of hope began to burn away the strange indifference that had clogged her mind at the sight of Mark and the pistol so close to her face.

  He was hulking, feet planted wide, a few feet in front of the rock she’d fallen asleep on. He’d let the beam of his flashlight drop to her chest, and she could see his face. The cruelty she’d noted before was honed by fatigue and the shock of finding his camp trashed. She guessed he wanted to torture her before he ended the game, vent the anger he probably always carried with him and, tonight, carried for her.

  Torture was good. It gave her time. The cool efficiency of an assassin’s bullet to the base of the skull was hard to outsmart.

  “Is Phil dead?” she asked because she needed to keep the conversation, and so herself, alive.

  “He wasn’t when I left,” Mark replied. A half smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and Anna knew he had finished the job she’d started before he came after her. Phil, if he could walk at all after the blow to the head, would have slowed Mark down. Left behind, there was a chance he’d be found by the rangers before the wilderness killed him. He might talk, trade information for leniency. Either way, he had become a liability. Mark had cut his losses.

  In a selfish and heartless way, Anna was glad. Phil might have died eventually from brain injury. This way she was absolved to a certain extent. She could pretend he would have awakened, seen stars, staggered a few steps, then, like Wile E. Coyote, been right as rain.

  “Ah,” she said.

  Mark sat opposite her on a matching boulder across the trail. He put the flashlight beside his thigh. Its beam now struck her in the sternum and enough was reflected back that he showed the ghoulish effect children try for when they put flashlights beneath their chins. The muzzle of the pistol remained steady, pointed at her center body mass. Without disturbing his aim, Mark fumbled a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it with the dexterity of a longtime smoker.

  Anna tried to see past blood and bone to the tickings of his mind. What would keep him talking? What would put him off guard? As far as she knew he believed her to be a crippled, middle-aged waitress—albeit with a homicidal streak where double-bladed axes were concerned—who had inadvertently stumbled on his salvage operation.

  She had that going for her. Might as well play it.

  “Why did you guys shoot at me? You scared me half to death. Did the gun go off by accident?” Innocence, stupidity, her husband, Zach, had once told her, were the hardest things for an actor to portray believably. Unlike him, Anna had never been much for being on stage. To her the lines sounded false to the point of absurdity.

  Mark twitched his aborted smile once again and blew smoke through his nostrils. In the strange light and frigid air the smoke swirled into the steam of their breath connecting them like ectoplasm. In an uncharacteristic flash of superstition, Anna nearly recoiled lest his evil enter her being. Horror passed but not this sudden sense of palpable evil.

  She’d arrested felons of various stripes: rapists, wife beaters, murderers, even a child molester. Several had done their damnedest to kill her. One had died by her hand. She’d sensed anger, greed, indifference, sickness of mind. Never before had she felt surpassing evil.

  Mark’s wasn’t even a sickness of the soul so much as an indefinable soullessness; the pleasure of other people’s pain not a lust nor an addiction but merely a passing entertainment. She’d never seen his eyes by the light of day, but she doubted all the sunlight in the world could illuminate the spark of the divine that cats, dogs and real people carried from cradle to grave.

  It was as if he were a spider in a man’s body.

  This staggering gestalt jolted through her in less time than it took for him to suck in another lungful of smoke. She was left with a creepy hollow feeling.

&n
bsp; “Yeah. An accident,” he said. Her question seemed so long ago it took her an instant to figure out what he was talking about. “I’m not used to these things.” He waved the gun with a degree of comfort that suggested he was as accustomed to pistol grips as Tiger Woods was to golf clubs.

  “Why did you bring it? It’s against park rules,” Anna said in the phony bad-actor voice that had settled in her throat. He couldn’t be buying her act. Evil wasn’t stupid. Evil was cunning.

  “Why did you run?” he countered. He tilted his cigarette and studied the growing ash.

  When the cigarette was finished, he’d kill her; Anna knew it as surely as if he’d told her. She’d only been left alive to amuse him during his smoke break.

  “Why did you chase me?” her own voice was back. It got his attention. His eyes locked on hers and widened slightly.

  “Well hello,” he said and she felt that the devil had seen her, recognized her. “What have we here?”

  “I don’t know what you mean . . .” Anna tried to get back into character and failed.

  “Don’t bore me.” It was a warning. Her life span might not be as long as his smoke.

  Strong and cold, a pillar of ice formed in the place womb, stomach, lungs and heart had once been. Her eyes narrowed. She leaned in toward him. In a voice Colleen Dewhurst would have found grating she said:

  “You stupid fuck, you know who I am.”

  His face went blank. Quick as a snake Anna struck. One hand swatted the gun from her chest; the other snapped to his face. Two fingers like fangs bit into his eyes. Anna felt the jelly wetting her finger as one burst. A gunshot deafened her. Cordite stung her nostrils. Muzzle-fire seared her retinas. The shot was wild. Mark was screaming, clawing at his face.

  Anna snatched his flashlight from the rock and staggered into the trees leaving him shrieking obscenities and flailing in the place that was to have been her grave.

  CHAPTER

  14

  The chilling core of hate stayed with Anna, supporting her as she gouged through the miserable black gut of the woods beside the Illilouette Trail. Tree cover was sparse and undergrowth virtually nonexistent. Stone shouldered through the earth’s skin, rotting trunks fell like matchsticks. A metallic taste in her mouth, biting fear at the edges of her mind, she drove on, stepping over, limping, scooting. Where she could, she confused her trail: circled, doubled back, crossed then recrossed granite slopes. Distance wasn’t as important as disappearance. Soon the ice pillar holding her up must melt and she would collapse. When this happened she must be well hidden. In an hour it would be light. If Mark were not dead or blind, he would try to find her.

  She moved and she hurt and she kept on moving and she did not think. She never wanted to think again.

  After forty minutes or more of tangling and obscuring her trail as best she could, she took shelter. The stolen pack with its stove and matches she eased under the low boughs of a lodgepole pine, careful to leave no drag marks and disturb none of the snow on the evergreen’s skirts. A hundred yards away she entombed herself in a log rotted out by cuboidal fungus. The tree’s flesh, red and shattered into thousands of cubes slightly bigger than sugar cubes, she used to bury the bits of sleeping bag that could not be fitted beneath the shell of wood that still existed. From the waist up she was sheltered, snuggled in the dead tree’s dark embrace like an outsized grub. Here she would sleep and hide through the daylight hours or here she would die. Her body would not allow her to run, and Mark wouldn’t hesitate a second time.

  Moving, she’d believed if she could stop she could sleep, would sleep; it would force itself on her the way it had when she sat down to rest on the trail. At last supine and, if not warm, at least not freezing, sleep did not come. Her insides were sick and creepy and scared. She wasn’t afraid Mark would find her hiding place and put a bullet in her brain. That fear would come later when daylight showed him her trail. The close, dark confines of her woodland sarcophagus didn’t bring forth the familiar terrors of claustrophobia. The thin shell of tree trunk above her was sufficiently weakened by weather and fungus she could break her way free should she need to.

  What sickened her was the encounter with Mark. She’d gouged out his eye. In the great scheme of things, that was no worse than clobbering him with the ax or shooting him—she would have welcomed either course of action—and given her size, age and weakened physical condition, it was one of the few ways left to her to disable an attacker.

  Had she chosen to blind him she would have done so without regrets. But it had not been her choice. The voice she’d cursed him with had not been her voice. She’d said, “You know who I am.” But somehow it was not she who spoke, and the “I” was a black shadow within her. His evil had called forth an answering evil, a darkness she’d not known was there, a thing without any light in it, any goodness or compassion or hope.

  You’re overtired,she told herself.Shock. Your head didn’t spin. Green bile didn’t fly out of your mouth. Leave it alone. Still, she didn’t sleep. This was something she needed to lay at Paul’s feet. A woman in Mississippi once said that being engaged to a sheriff/priest must be glorious. She could sin, get caught, repent, atone and be forgiven all in the arms of one man.

  Thinking of Paul Davidson’s kind eyes and slow smile, Anna drifted off.

  Consciousness came in a welter of confusion. Unfocused dream images crawled through her sleeping brain leaving snail-trails of dread. A serial killer stalked her. Or she was a serial killer and, like Pilate, like Lady MacBeth, she couldn’t cleanse the blood from her hands. The serpents of the id called to her in high pitched sing-song voices:

  “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

  “You can run but you can’t hide.”

  It took longer than she would have liked—longer than it ever had before—to metaphorically find her feet. A crescent moon of light arced over her hips. Day had come. She was in a log, partially covered by its hollow trunk, partially by rotted wood cubed by an architecturally minded fungus. Wrists crossed on her chest in the time-honored tradition of earthly remains put out for viewing, she was able to see her watch. The darkness in her end of the log was such that she had to put on its tiny nightlight. Careful to shield the blue lest this electronic glowworm get her killed, she read the hands: ten-seventeen. She had had four or more hours of sleep and was better for it. The monsters were no longer within but without.

  “I got all day.”

  Then: “Goddamnit where the fuck . . . Show yourself and I’ll kill you quick,” and the heavy thump of wood struck with tremendous force.

  Anna was fully awake now. The thud was the ax blade buried in a tree. She had had to leave it behind. Mark hadn’t given up. He’d not been blinded. He was here. A shock of adrenaline would have made her twitch, give herself away, but numbness saved her.

  A grunt sounded. Probably Mark pulling the ax out of whatever tree he’d hacked into. Bundled feet whuffed and crunched over the crusty snow. A dragging shush. Hawking, spitting. More footsteps. Nearer. Then seemingly to the left of her hiding place. The right. Down by her feet. Snuffling. Anna listened till her ears ached with the strain. There was nothing she could do but wait and hope. Prayer had been burned away when The Presence entered her on a column of ice and saved her.Saved me for what, she wondered.For himself? “No time to get the vapors,” she heard Edith, the mother-in-law she had dearly loved, say. “There’s work to be done.”

  Anna would have welcomed physical or mental work, business for hands or mind. The work before her was of the kind she found the most trying: she must do absolutely nothing in complete silence for as long as she could.

  Her clattering thoughts moved from the realm of Catholic horror stories of demon possession and soul snatching to the world of make-believe—a short trip at best. She saw herself from above, lying still and cold in the hollowed log, a near-perfect arc of wood covering her from hip to head, cubed pine like chunks of red gold heaped over her from hip to toes. It put her in mind of the gla
ss-topped bier in which Prince Charming laid Snow White. At least he did in the Disney version.

  Snow White waited to be awakened with a kiss, Anna with an ax.

  Her mother had warned her that comparing herself to the other girls would make her miserable in the end.

  Noise from without began to lose meaning and direction. Thinking clearly on one’s back in a hollow log was harder than Anna would have guessed. Disorienting. Mark was out there but the snuffs and shuffles and grunts seemed to come not from a man but from bears, out of their dens and around her log for a late-autumn snack before the long winter’s repose.

  “Damn. About fucking time.” This was said so close by, Anna opened her eyes wide in order to be paying attention when she died and not miss anything. Despite the earlier threat, she believed it would be quick; not out of mercy—the devil prided himself on mercilessness—but because he, too, was cold and hungry and tired and hurt. Pure hatefulness was probably all that kept him around. That and the fear she’d report back and federal claim jumpers would take his find.

  Four gunshots cracked, the sound exploding so loud Anna knew she’d been hit. Numbed from so long without moving and the shock of bullets ripping her flesh, she couldn’t tell where. Stilling her breath, she waited for the agony then the peace of life pulsing out.

  Mark’s footsteps stamped purposefully away. “God,” he muttered. Anna found it preferable to his usual expletive. “If I ever leave San Francisco again, they can fucking shoot me.” Anna was disappointed. The last thing a person heard should be Shakespeare, music or the purring of a cat.

  “God damn it,” exploded almost as loud as the gunfire, but farther away. Crashing and more cursing followed.

  Anna was not shot. Anna was not found. The pack she’d stolen had probably been fatally wounded, but she was okay. A fervent prayer of thanks began to form. She quashed it, not knowing to whom or to what she owed this extra time.