Zero Visibility

by Sharon Dunn

  The gun wavered a little in the thief’s hand. The hardness of his expression changed, indicating that doubt had crept in.

  “So you go to jail for something your boss set up.” Nathan edged a little closer to Merci. “That doesn’t seem very fair to me.”

  The thief lifted his chin and pressed his lips together. “Boss says the way he’s got it planned, they will never find your body.” A sense of self-satisfaction permeated his voice.

  Merci’s sharp intake of breath was audible. Her head jerked back. Nathan put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  Though he looked the thief in the eye, his peripheral attention was on the gun. He didn’t want to die today, and he sure didn’t want Merci to die. All he needed was a moment of distraction. Nathan shifted his gaze and made his eyes go wide as though he was seeing something in the trees. The thief’s hand holding the gun slackened, and his eyes moved sideways.

  Nathan jumped on him, driving the hand holding the gun upward and pinching the nerves in his wrist so the thief let go of the gun. The man managed to get a solid punch to Nathan’s stomach before they both tumbled to the ground. He fought past the pain and caught a glimpse of Merci scrambling to get her boot on as he rolled. Pain from his knife wound electrified his nerve endings. Once he was on top of the thief, he landed a hard blow to the man’s neck. Not enough to knock him out, but enough to leave him gasping. He punched him a second time in the stomach. The man drew up into a fetal position.

  Nathan glanced around the area. Where was the gun?

  “I can’t find it,” Merci said.

  The thief continued to clutch his stomach and struggle for breath.

  “No time. Let’s move.” The others were no doubt closing in on them from other parts of the forest.

  They ran. He had no idea where they were, only that moving downward would eventually connect them to the country two-lane. If they could follow that out, they could get to the highway…if the thieves didn’t get them first.

  When they came out of the forest back toward the ski run, the groomer was still making its way down. They slipped back into the trees and ran until they came to a river partially frozen over. Only the water in the middle of the river flowed, pushing ice chunks downriver.

  “Now what?” said Merci, staring at the freezing water.

  FOURTEEN

  Merci’s heart pounded erratically as she glanced over her shoulder at the trees they had just emerged from. The thieves would catch up soon enough.

  Nathan gripped her gloved hand. “We’ve got to jump across. The groomer won’t be able to follow us across the river. Then they’ll be on foot, too.”

  “The ice looks really thin.” The river was at least fifteen feet across, too wide to make in a single leap. A hard fall on the ice would break it for sure. Merci was still struggling for a deep breath from their run.

  “The trick is to choose where the ice is thickest. I’ll go out first. Walk where I walk.” Nathan placed a tentative foot on a frozen edge of the river. It held him without cracking. She sucked in a shaky breath as he stretched his leg out and took another step.

  One more step and he was able to leap across the narrow opening where the water still flowed freely. She cringed, fearing the ice would crack from his hard landing.

  His feet touched the other side of the bank, and he turned to face her. “Did you see where I went?”

  She nodded.

  Nathan broke eye contact with her and glanced over her shoulder.

  “Are they coming?”

  He turned his head slightly as he searched the tree line. “I don’t see them.”

  Merci took a breath and stepped free of the bank. The ice held. She lifted her foot and stepped forward. As she put her foot down, it slid on the ice, straining her leg muscles. The ice beneath her cracked. She screamed. Her foot went into the cold river water.

  Nathan grabbed her and pulled her to solid ground, holding her in his arms.

  Already the icy chill from exposure had seeped through her skin. “My foot is soaking wet.”

  “Can you run?” His attention was on the hill behind them.

  When she turned, she saw the groomer lumbering over a bump that must have hid it from view.

  “Do I have a choice?” Her leg already felt like a block of ice. This was way worse than having snow in her boot. Though the long underwear and thick jeans provided some protection to her leg, her boot had soaked clean through and saturated the sock.

  Nathan led them downhill away from the river toward an aspen grove that provided a little cover. They ran for what seemed like miles. The sun peaked up over the mountain when they finally stopped by a rock formation. The river had to have stopped the groomer, and the thieves would not know exactly what direction they had gone once they crossed the river. They had a moment to catch their breath.

  Merci pulled the prepackaged meal Elle had given her out of her backpack, and Nathan did the same. She chewed the meal, which was labeled lasagna but tasted more like cardboard with marinara sauce on it. It would be nice to wash the food down with something. She hadn’t thought to ask Elle for water. “I’m really thirsty.” She leaned down to scoop up a handful of snow.

  Nathan grabbed her hand and brushed the snow off her glove. “Don’t eat frozen snow. It’ll kill you. Your core body temp will go down.”

  Her leg that had been exposed to the cold river water had gone numb, and her jeans were frozen. When she stepped on it, there was no sensation. She was pretty sure her core body temperature had already been affected. “I need a drink of water.” She wrapped her arms around her torso and shivered. Her throat felt unbearably dry. “Do you still have the matches?” When she swallowed she couldn’t produce any moisture in her mouth.

  “They’re in my pocket, but I lost the tin can somewhere. If we can find any kind of container, I’ll melt some snow for you.”

  She appreciated the compassion she heard in his voice and the way he reached up to brush his hand over her cheek.

  “Hang in there,” he added. “We should keep moving. The more distance we can put between them and us, the better.” He trudged forward.

  She followed behind. Her mind was still on the water. If she could only have a drink. “How much farther to the road?” She stared at Nathan’s back. He didn’t turn around or answer her. “You don’t know where we are, do you?”

  He kept walking. A sense of hopelessness crowded into her thoughts. She had no feeling in her leg from the calf down. She was unbearably thirsty. They were lost, and it was only matter of time before the thieves caught up with them.

  Merci crumpled down into the snow.

  Nathan stopped and rushed toward her.

  “I can’t keep going.” Tears formed.

  “Sure you can.” He pulled his gloves off and touched her cheek. “Come on, I’ll help you up.”

  “You don’t even know how far it is to the road.” More than anything, she just wanted to lie down and sleep.

  “Everything is covered in snow, and the way we left the ski hill was rather haphazard. Something will look familiar sooner or later.” Nathan’s voice was soft and undemanding. He kneeled beside her. “Who was it that told me we couldn’t lose hope?”

  The look of assurance in Nathan’s expression renewed her strength. She managed a smile. “Talk about my words coming back to bite me, huh?”

  “Come on, I’ll help you walk,” he said.

  She wrapped her arm around his shoulder and leaned against him. “Am I going to lose my leg? There’s no feeling left in it.”

  “I don’t know. We need to get to a place where I can have a look at it.” An undercurrent of worry colored his voice. Was there something he wasn’t telling her? He of all people must understand about the effects of exposure to freezing water.

  As they came out into an open area, the wind picked up, forcing them to bend and stare at the ground as they walked. Merci pushed her knit hat farther down on her head so it covered more of her ears and neck. She’d lo
st the hat liner Nathan had given her somewhere along the way. When she tilted her head toward the sky, the charcoal clouds toppled what little optimism she had left. Not another storm.

  Their feet sunk into the deep snow.

  “We need to get near some trees for shelter.” Nathan had to raise his voice to be heard above the wind.

  Merci lifted her head to look around. A flash of orange in a sea of white caught her eye. It took her a moment to process the incongruity of what was seeing. “That’s my sweater.”

  “What?”

  “My sweater from my suitcase.” She ran toward the orange object. The deep snow slowed her down. She stopped and stared down at the sweater with the large buttons half buried in the snow.

  Nathan came up beside her. “For a moment, I thought you were so far gone you were hallucinating.”

  With a little effort she yanked the sweater out of the snow. “It must mean we’re close to Lorelei’s car.” She glanced side to side but only an endless field of snow surrounded her.

  “It could have gotten blown around during the storm.” Nathan turned in a half circle.

  “It couldn’t blow too far, especially uphill. This is the first sign that we are close.”

  Nathan pressed his lips together and continued to study the landscape. “I say we keep heading downhill. Maybe cut toward those trees.”

  Merci agreed. They walked together, arms wrapped around each other. Nathan hadn’t complained about the deep knife wound, but every once in a while she saw him wince with pain. They were both in rough shape.

  Though it was no longer wearable, she held on to the sweater. Glancing down at it in her hand helped her to remain positive. They had to be close. They just had to be.

  They edged closer to the trees, which blocked out most of the wind.

  Nathan stopped and pointed at a purple-and-orange scarf hanging off a tree branch in front of them. “Look there.”

  “That’s mine.” Merci raced down the hill yelling over her shoulder. “Hurry, Nathan. We’re close. I just know we are.”

  She ran so fast she tumbled and rolled in the snow. The fall did nothing to deflate her spirits. The road and the car were close. She could feel it. Merci pushed herself to her feet, scanning the field of snow for any dark object. She found a blouse half buried in the snow.

  Nathan came up to her. “I know where we are at now.” He turned and pointed behind them. “That ridgeline is where I was riding the snowmobile the day I saw you and Lorelei.”

  “That feels like a million years ago.” She was a different person from the naive college student who had left Montana State almost three days ago.

  “Feels like that, doesn’t it?” His voice grew serious. Nathan looked up the mountain. “My guess is that we need to move west.”

  They trudged forward with renewed energy, encountering a few more objects that had been in her suitcase. The car, nearly covered in snow, came into view when they rounded a curve in the road.

  Merci burst forth, but Nathan grabbed her arm. “Wait just a minute. We got ambushed with that helicopter; let’s make sure they haven’t beaten us here.”

  Nathan put his arm out to bar Merci from taking another step. He needed to make sure it was safe. “I’ll go first. You wait here behind these trees. Wait until I give you the all-clear.”

  Nathan stepped out into the open and approached the car. He didn’t see any signs of life. The footprints around the car looked old and drifted over. The trunk was wide open and shoes, books and smaller bags were strewn up the hill.

  A foot of snow covered the car, and there was no sign of it having been brushed off anywhere. When he looked behind him, Merci peeked around the trees. He waved for her to come out. She ran toward him favoring her left leg, but slowed as she drew near. Her expression changed when her gaze darted around at the items that had been dragged out of the car and strung all over. Her features clouded and her shoulders drooped.

  “Are you okay?”

  Her gloved hand fluttered to her chest. “This is all my stuff. They went through everything I brought with me.”

  Nathan brushed away snow from the driver’s-side door and clicked the door open. “Why don’t we get in here, get warmed up, and I can have a look at your leg.”

  Merci ran to pick up a book and then a knitted scarf and a pair of jeans. Nathan brushed more snow off the car so they could see out the front windshield. When he looked up, Merci had gathered an armload of possessions. Her demeanor had changed. The way she bent her head and the redness in her face suggested that she was upset.

  “Merci.” He called over the hood of the car.

  She stopped and dropped the items she had gathered onto the snowy ground. “These are my private things. They went through my whole suitcase, everything that matters to me.”

  He circled around the car and grabbed her hands. “We don’t need to do all that. Let’s get in the car. We need to get your leg thawed out.”

  She pulled free of his grasp and pointed to her suitcase. “They tore that to pieces. Why?”

  “Merci, this is upsetting you. Once we’re warmed up, we can hike out to the highway. Someone will pick us up.” He brushed away the snow on the passenger side and ushered her in before getting in on the driver’s side.

  Once she was settled in the passenger seat, Merci pulled her boot off and untwisted the makeshift sock. “I think the wool helped a lot. The feeling is starting to come back into my toes.”

  Nathan looked down at her bare toes, which were so white it looked as if the blood had been drained out of them. “You’ve got some frostbite damage, but at least the toes aren’t blue and frozen through. They’d amputate then.”

  She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “That’s one good thing, I guess.”

  He grabbed a sweater from the backseat. “Pull up your pant leg a bit and wrap this around it. Do you have another pair of boots and socks around here?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice held a tone of sadness. “If the thieves didn’t scatter them up the hill, there might be a pair back there.”

  After wrapping the sweater around Merci’s leg, Nathan turned his attention to the car. The keys were still in the ignition. Driving out wasn’t a possibility though with the roads still unplowed. Nathan tilted his head sideways to look at the wires underneath the dashboard. “I think I see how Lorelei made it look like the car wasn’t running. It would be nothing to disconnect this ignition wire while you weren’t looking.”

  “So their plan must have been to drive me to this isolated place, rob me and then…leave me here.” Her voice held a distant quality as if she was trying to process what all of this meant.

  Nathan looked into her sad green eyes. Sympathy flooded through him. She was dealing with so much all at once. He shook his head. “Remember, they said that things went wrong. The guy in the Orange Coat wasn’t supposed to pull the gun. They were probably going to take what they wanted, and you and Lorelei would go down the road not even realizing you’d been robbed.”

  “And then I would never know Lorelei had set me up.” Merci turned away and stared straight ahead through the small hole he had cleared in the windshield. After a long silence, she said, “They didn’t touch Lorelei’s stuff. I guess that seals the deal that she was in on this.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over this. She was a pretty good actress.” He patted her shoulder.

  She turned toward him and fell against his chest. “I can be so stupid sometimes. You know when those guys pulled up in their car, I had a bad feeling then, but I totally brushed it off thinking I was just being prejudiced because of the way they looked.” The wavering in her voice told him that she was crying.

  He drew her closer and held her while she cried. His lips brushed over the top of her head. As her sobbing subsided, he said, “It’s so hard to know when to trust and when not to.”

  She pulled away from him and rummaged through the glove compartment for a travel-size bag of tissues. “Lorelei offering me a
ride was a setup to get me out here.” She combed her fingers through her long red hair. “They probably had something to do with my car breaking down, too. Now that I think about it, the timing was weird that she showed up right when I was checking out the Share a Ride board.”

  Nathan glanced in the backseat searching for a pair of boots. A laptop case rested beside an overnight bag. He reached over and grabbed the case. The weight of it told him that the computer was inside. “What kind of thieves leave a laptop behind?”

  “I don’t know.” Merci’s gaze was unfocused, and her voice still held a disconnected quality.

  Something didn’t fit with the whole robbery. Hawthorne had done a great deal of planning and utilized a lot of manpower for what would maybe be a thousand dollars worth of possessions, and then he didn’t take the laptop. If the original plan had been for Lorelei to continue the ruse and take Merci to her aunt’s, the thieves wouldn’t have intended on taking anything that would be noticed as missing right away. Nathan nodded as a realization came to him. “I think they were looking for something in particular. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  She turned toward him, the glazed look in her eyes clearing up. “No. I can’t think of what I brought with me that would be of enough value to go to all this trouble. But it does explain why they sent Lorelei into that room to pump me for information.”

  “Think about the week before you left. You said your car broke down. Did anything else weird happen?

  “Someone slipped into my dorm room and stole some books.” She leaned her head against the backrest and stared at the ceiling. “The break-in was a really freaky experience. I was sleeping, and I thought I heard someone in my room. But the next morning, I thought I had just dreamed it until I couldn’t find my textbooks. I just figured it was someone selling them back to the bookstore for quick cash.”

  “Had Lorelei been friendly to you before?”

  Merci sat up a little straighter in her chair. “She always seemed like a nice person. She sat beside me quite a bit last year when we had that marketing class together. We said hi when we saw each other, but we didn’t do things together.”