Justin tugs at the zipper of his parka. “I’d like to see the numbers on that,” he says. “I’d like to read the interview where an actual bear states that to be the case.”
Karo takes a few steps out, scanning the way ahead. There’s no other sign of life, but the wind whipping at the top layer of snow has already covered their own tracks.
“Well, we’re out here now,” Sim says.
Karo’s jaw tenses and she looks from Dan to Sim and back again.
“It’s true,” she says finally. “If the road is open, then problem solved.”
Anna reaches into her pocket, pulls out a bell. “And here I thought I was being neurotic.”
“Oh, handy,” Justin says. “A dinner bell.”
“We’re a large group, we’re making plenty of noise—” Sim says.
But Dan steps over to where Maeve and Anna are standing close. “Go ahead and wear the bell if it makes you feel better.”
Sim turns and stalks past him, farther up the trail.
Dan pauses, but then he unclips the can of bear spray from his belt and tosses it to Karo. He takes a new one out of his pack.
“Front and rear guard,” he says, pushing past Sim again.
They keep on, Anna’s bell marking time now as they go, the three men in front and the women behind.
Maeve keeps her eyes on the horizon ahead and says nothing, but inside her mittens, her hands are curled into fists. Justin spins around, casual, as though he’s just being social and not really looking behind them, but maybe just a little. His red scarf flutters slightly in the wind. For a moment he walks backward, narrating.
“It was only their snow pants that saved them—six overdressed artistes mauled at mountain colony,” he says. “News at eleven.”
He turns to face forward, tripping and recovering as he goes but making it stylish all the same.
It’s another half hour of slogging before they finally come to where Dan thinks there should be a road.
There is no road.
“Okay,” Dan breathes, and it’s the first time his voice wavers. Maeve feels a hard squeeze in the center of her chest.
The western ridge snowpack, when it came down, sounded closest. The more immediate worry.
“And it was closer,” Dan says now. “We know that’s true. It’s just that the trigger point of the avalanche here on the eastern side—”
“Trigger point?” Anna cuts in. “You mean they detonated? On purpose? I thought that never happened. You said next week—”
She looks to Karo, who answers in a grim voice.
“No. Nobody caused this. The trigger point is just the place where stress on the underlying layer becomes too much. Once one piece gives way—”
“It’s where the avalanche begins,” Dan says.
He says he’d thought it was farther off.
From here they can see the path the slab took down the side of the mountain, maybe a mile wide. Much bigger than any of them had imagined, a trail of ice and debris that rises up ahead where they’d expected the valley to dip low.
“Okay,” Dan says again, and he moves automatically to Karolina’s side, unzips her pack, and draws the radio out.
Maeve turns and looks back the way they came rather than out at the damage ahead. The center, she knows, lies far below them now: too far away to see and hidden, anyway, by the woods between. She can hear Dan and Karolina conferring over the radio, the hand crank turning jerkily around. Dan already doubling-down on his detached calm, his Father Knows Best bullshit. Maeve pulls her sweater up over her chin against the cold. She holds her mittens over her nose.
There is no road. There is no crew working on the power lines. There aren’t even utility poles anymore.
“Let me see your face.”
She turns to find Sim standing beside her, squinting down against the snow’s glare. There’s a high sun but the cold is brutal now. Maeve, lost in the anxiety of the moment, lets her hands drop to her sides.
“Here.” He pulls the fur-lined hat off his own head and holds it out, but Maeve can’t move. She just looks at him. “Here,” he says again, and this time he tugs her hood down himself and fits the hat snugly over her ears, tucking the fur trim deep into the neckline of her coat. The difference is immediate: Maeve melts into it, relief running through her in response to the new warmth. It’s a kind gesture, and he moves more gently than she expects. But then he turns and shouts over his shoulder: “We need to head back, Maeve can’t be out here any longer.”
“What’s going on?” Anna looks over from where she is watching the radio trials.
“She’s not built for this, she’ll have frostbite if we stay out here.”
Maeve only shrugs a little deeper into her coat. She is cold. She is not sure if she is in danger. How do you know? She watches as Anna kicks through the snow toward them, her bell chiming merrily.
“What are you, Dr. Nielssen now?”
“It’s not a fucking joke.” He turns back to Maeve, but Anna keeps coming.
“It’s not a fucking joke, man—” His words, her own mocking tone.
Maeve can see Sim bristle, but it’s Dan who cuts her off, yelling from behind them: “Anna! Cool it.”
Maeve looks to her, surprised. Anna slowly turns around, but Karo calls out before either of them have a chance to respond.
“We just need a bit more time! The cold is making it difficult to charge.”
Dan says nothing more now. He’s crouched low in the snow, focused on cranking the radio.
“It’s a goddamn emergency radio,” Sim says under his breath. “What do you mean it doesn’t work in the cold?” Then, louder: “I’ll take Maeve back to the center myself.”
Dan jerks to his feet.
“No. We stay together.”
“I’m really fine,” Maeve says. “I’ll be fine. I’d rather give them some time—”
“Can you give them five fucking minutes?” Justin has had his back to everyone, looking out to where the road should have been, but now he whips around. His face is buried inside his hood, the red scarf cutting a line at his chin. He’s lost his customary flippancy: the change is stark. “Give them five minutes to figure out if anyone even remembers we’re out here?”
Karolina marks the edge in his voice and steps in.
“Of course they know we’re up here. That’s not even an issue. It’s just a matter of getting a timeline on the road being dug out.” But she’s cold too; Maeve can see that her hands are trembling.
“Let me see now,” Anna says, hooking a finger into the edge of the hat where it comes in at Maeve’s cheek. She pulls it aside and gives her face a quick scan. “You look fine,” she says. Then, turning to Sim: “But this was a nice touch, Dr. Nielssen, very chivalrous.”
If Maeve wasn’t so numb, she’d say something. Crack a joke, even, on Justin’s behalf. Break the tension. But she just tugs the hat on more securely and turns away.
“Fine,” Sim says. “We’ll just let the next person freeze.”
Dan has his gloves off, trying to hold the heat of his skin to the radio crank.
“It’s no good,” he says finally. “Nielssen’s right, we should get back before anyone loses a toe.”
Maeve thinks Sim must be pleased, at least, that he’s been vindicated, but he doesn’t say a word to her or anyone.
The way back is marked by silence. They move faster, in part to stay warm, in part just to put the disappointment behind them. The sunshine that buoyed her spirits on waking is long gone, replaced by a new and dense bank of low cloud. Maeve can’t shake the feeling that there is something there, behind them—a shifting darkness, unstoppable. But when she finally turns to look, there’s nothing. Only the mountain itself.
Wind rips at them. She can see in the distance where the new storm is closing in, already on their heels. The snowshoes catch and flap and she wonders if she could run with them on, how long it would take to get the damn things off if she needed to.
The snow starts blowing a
s they approach the river valley; this time, Dan leads them into the trees. There’s no path, anyway, he says. They need to take a more sheltered route.
Anna stops.
“What about the bear?”
The group slows around her. Maeve checks over her shoulder, then ahead into the trees. Too many branches, too close together to see much at all. And something else: it takes Maeve a moment to put her finger on it. The usual chatter of the forest, birds or squirrels or other little animals, is missing. The place is marked by a terrible stillness, the only sound the creak of trees in the wind.
“We’re just as unlikely to meet a bear in the woods as out of it,” Karo says. “Isn’t that true, Dan?”
Dan says he wouldn’t suggest anything he didn’t think was safe. He says they’re a big, noisy group—as though Sim hadn’t said exactly the same thing earlier. She wonders if he likes this plan only because he’s the one putting it forward.
Anna hesitates, and Maeve holds out a hand to her.
“It’s faster,” Maeve says. “We’ll be able to think more clearly once we get back, when we’re inside.”
This has the ring of good sense to it, although even Maeve is not sure she believes it. She knows she is cold and getting colder, and there’s a rising panic she can feel in her chest. Anna looks from Dan to Karo, then back to Dan, waiting for him to give her a nod before she begins to move again.
Maeve keeps her eyes on the ground, struggling through deep snow that is mined with bush hazards. If she focuses on making a path, she won’t worry about what’s going to happen next. Or what won’t happen.
No road, no radio, no radio, no road. It’s the wrong mantra, unhelpful, but she keeps coming back to it.
They’re only a few hundred yards into the trees when she feels Anna pull up and freeze in front of her. The bell gives a dull clank. Anna’s reaction is so sudden, Maeve’s stomach drops. She looks up.
“No one move,” Dan says.
Elk. There are elk all around them, still as the trees. Where the branches have been swept of snow, they camouflage the herd, and Maeve struggles to count them all, her eyes moving from cow to cow. The females are big enough on their own—but she’s looking for antlers. Early snow or not, it’s still the rut. You don’t want to get caught between a bull and a cow. An elk bull can be almost as big as a young moose.
There are three cows all within arm’s length to Maeve’s left, and more ahead. How did they get so far into the forest without noticing them? The one closest flares her nostrils, her breath a puff of steam. She steps forward. Maeve steps back.
“We can make it through.”
This is Sim, quietly.
“No,” Dan says.
“We’re already almost through.”
“No.”
Maeve checks behind her. There are a scattered few cows to each side, but their path, the path they forged through the snow, is still clear.
“It’s just a bunch of females, there’s nothing to worry about.” Sim starts moving again, trying to force them to press on. “We’ll be in more trouble out in the open if the storm catches us.”
But when she looks ahead, Maeve sees one bull, and then a second one, up higher in the forest. Antlers disguised among the branches.
“It’s both herds,” Karo says. She’s remarkably still, her hands wedged in her pockets, arms tight at her sides. “I can’t believe how many.”
“Best not to turn around. Move backward,” Dan says.
“It’s three times as far if we go back,” Sim says. He strides forward a step and one of the cows snorts, then stamps the ground nervously.
“You need to stop arguing.” Dan doesn’t turn his head as he speaks, focused on the herd, his jaw set.
Anna is already backing up. From somewhere to their right comes the high, haunted call—like a wraith, Maeve had said that first night. Now it sounds more painful than that, sharper. She moves lightly backward, high-stepping so that the snowshoes won’t trip her up.
Sim is the last one to follow.
He’s right, in a way: by the time they retrace their steps and find their old path back to the center, the light is failing. It’s a long walk, and deeply cold.
When they reach the center’s back exit, it’s clear that Karo expects Sadie to be there to let them in—but she’s not. There’s a beat, Karo knocking on the glass, before Sim reaches out and simply pulls the door open himself. He turns to Dan.
“Glad enough I rigged it now.”
He holds it open for Maeve and she is first inside—which is why she is the only one to actually see Sadie before the others pile in behind her. Sadie in profile, the soft click of Sim’s gallery door as she exits, tension showing on her face. She turns the key in the lock and then she’s skittering to the doorway to greet them, the others all crowding in behind Maeve. Her worried look evaporating into a staged smile.
But there’s no time to process it; Karo already has five tasks lined up for Sadie. The two women hurry off to the kitchen and Sim bends over the fire, building it higher. Anna and Justin crash around at the door, trying to help Dan organize the snowshoes in sets and get them back down to storage, leaving Maeve alone, her fingers white with cold. She glances one more time at the gallery door and then heads slowly upstairs for a change of socks and a new sweater.
The fire is burning high and hot by the time she gets back. There’s a bottle of whiskey and they pass it around. No one makes tea now, although there’s soup, excavated from the freezer and set in the pot by the fire, and more bread thawing out on the hot stonework next to it.
Maeve watches the others drink and thinks crazy thoughts.
She knows they must be crazy, but it’s hard to stop them coming. The debris field is too wide, the avalanche too close, the lack of contact with the town below too strange. There’s been some kind of annihilation. The disaster caused not by extreme weather but by an explosion.
If this—whatever it is, a war? a terrorist attack of some kind?—has reached the middle of nowhere, then what is happening in the cities? Did her mother ever bring the kids back home?
Maeve finds herself holding her breath. It’s essential for her to picture life going on as usual, the subway running, school lunch being served at noon on reusable plastic, and she works hard to imagine just this: Talia eating a plate of macaroni at a table of little girls set up in a grade-school gym. Rudy putting on his snow pants for kindergarten play.
She refocuses, forcing herself to come back to the moment and the room of—what should she call them? Her companions? Survivors?
They’re still talking about the elk.
“So strange,” Karo says. Her voice is cloudy. Exhausted. “For there to be so many all in one place. How they even climbed out of the valley with so much snow . . . ” They usually don’t come so high into the forest, not in winter, she says.
The radio is at her feet, but she’s stopped trying for a channel. She hasn’t touched it since they got back.
Beside her, Sadie plays with Justin’s camera. She pokes at him, teasing: It was just sitting under the chair where he’d left it, she says. After all that fuss. Why can’t men ever find things?
“Say cheese!” She spins toward Anna. “It’s a snow-day miracle!”
But Sadie was warm and dry by the fire all afternoon. The rest of them aren’t in the mood for games.
Or, not by the fire after all—but skulking around in the gallery and who knows where else. Maeve checks for the bear claw in her hip pocket. Still there. She wonders now if it could have been Sadie who snuck into her room? To what end?
And the gallery key—is it her own, given to her, or did she take it from the desk? Maeve shakes her head; she’s starting to sound paranoid even to herself. Maybe Sadie is just on the hook to clean the space now that the housekeepers are no longer here. Another drudgery job inflicted on her by Karo.
But that wouldn’t explain what she was doing down in the spa, peering through doorways. There’s still no easy answer for tha
t.
“Animals do weird things after—” Dan starts, but he falters, trying to find the right word. Maeve brings her attention back to the group: Not “disaster.” Don’t start using words like that. “After an event like this,” he says finally.
“Nature turns to chaos,” Sim says, looking at Anna. The theme of her project, her werewolf film. He goes to refill his mug but finds the bottle empty and gets up to retrieve a new one.
“This isn’t chaos. It’s predictable.” Justin slings his legs over the arm of his chair and settles in. “My first job, like, as an intern? Climatology beat—”
“You mean weather boy,” Anna says.
More sniping. Maeve reaches for the radio to try it herself, but her fingertips barely graze the handle before Karo skims it with her foot, moving it deftly under her own chair.
“Leave it alone.” She doesn’t even turn to look at Maeve as she speaks.
Verboten. Sim mouths the word from where he’s standing with the new bottle, behind Anna’s chair. Maeve just nods, confused.
“I mean, they were talking about this kind of extreme weather long before my time. Way long. Thirty years ago, easy,” Justin says. “When you think of it that way, nothing the animals might do feels weird—”
“Even sneaking down the mountain, right, Maeve?” Dan stumbles a little as he rises to his feet.
She doesn’t know why he’s singling her out. Because she insisted on talking about the bear outside her studio? Because she didn’t give him the reaction he wanted when he surprised her there, letting himself in with his own key? She wonders now what his expectation had been.
“Next thing you know, we’ll be tracking prints right into your room—” He lurches forward, drawing the flashlight off his tool belt like a pistol and flicking it on. “There it is! Under your bed! Hiding in your suitcase!” The light glares in her eyes.
She pulls back. In her suitcase?
Still in her seat, Anna blanches. “Stop being an idiot, Dan. You’re blinding her.”
A prickle rises on Maeve’s arms, the back of her neck. If Dan leads tracking expeditions, he probably has his share of souvenirs—even a bear claw or two. Maeve feels her throat tighten.
The Retreat Page 12