I turned and saw bright eyes fixed on me from under a helmet. She was in her twenties, wisps of red hair around a pale, freckled face. Tension poured out of me like a dam-burst. I stepped aside and she trundled past, a thin smile on her lips.
The road was shady but by now I was sweating heavily. At the intersection, I took the turn that led back to Fort Stuart, knowing that if one of the men behind also did so, it would be a strong indication that he was following me.
Around the corner, I picked up the pace and kept myself from looking back for as long as possible. I was almost at the graveyard when I finally turned my head. One of the men, the taller, young looking one, was behind me. All I could make out was a dark face under a white hoodie.
I passed a tiny church and went through the iron gates of the graveyard. It was flat, open ground where he wouldn’t be able to get close to me without showing himself. I had not thought out what was going to happen now or what exactly I should do. Obviously he was trailing me for a deadly purpose. But did he want the final confrontation here? I had no way of knowing. Did I want it here? I wasn’t sure of that either.
The graveyard was old and crowded with graves, including small stone plaques set into the ground where very young children had been buried. I tried to avoid walking over them. An old-fashioned crypt stood at the far side, looking like a massive stone doghouse, and I took the short gravel path that led to it. Ivy crept along cracks on the walls of the crypt and entwined itself around ornamental fleur-de-lis at the top. I walked down one side and discovered it was completely open at the back, disused and derelict.
Behind me I heard the creak of the rusty iron gate. The crypt was about head height and, without thinking about it, I stepped inside. For the next minute or two there was silence, then I thought I could make out footsteps on the flat stone plaques. As my ears strained to hear more, suddenly there was the crunching of gravel on the path to the crypt.
Had he seen me? I took the automatic out, checked that the safety was off, and held it in front of me with both hands. The footsteps rapidly approached. Now they were on the grass alongside the crypt. Any second now he would be here. I raised the gun higher and stepped out of the crypt.
“Drop it,” I said, only faintly aware that I sounded like someone out of an old Western.
He was right in front of me and as soon as I appeared he stopped and stood absolutely still, as if frozen. My finger tightened on the trigger. Then he lowered the dark automatic pistol he was holding in his right hand.
As I looked at him an image of María flooded my mind and it was as much as I could do to hold my own weapon still. Not that this person resembled her in more than skin colour. His flabby, round face and pockmarked complexion were a world away from María’s high cheekbones, pert nose and beautiful lips. And the cruel sneer that appeared around his mouth was never hers. Yet the face I was now staring at was all too familiar.
In front of me stood Bautista, María’s older brother. I knew exactly why he was here. Of course, I’d known all along.
“Yes, it’s me,” he said. He spat on the ground, slipped the gun under the waistband behind his jacket, and put both hands into his pockets. “I thought you might be waiting for me. Now you have a big decision to make.”
We stared at each other for a long minute. All I could still see in my mind was María. My left hand nervously groped for the small, hard beads hanging around my neck.
I swallowed hard and lowered my automatic.
Chapter 37
14,000 feet up Glaciar de las Lágrimas, between Cerro Sosneado and Volcán Tinguiririca, Andes Mountains, a year earlier.
I awoke and my hand went to my throat, feeling for María’s rosary. She’d kept it in her purse in a separate pouch and I’d put it on yesterday after I’d visited her mound. My fingers felt the little black antique beads and the silver crucifix inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It was a beautiful thing and having it close gave me tangible comfort that what I was doing was right, or at least acceptable.
Outside, the sky was overcast but calm. I was still feeble and weak but knew if I continued on my chosen path I would inevitably grow stronger. Soon I hoped to have enough energy to attempt a descent of the mountain and search for help.
Escape was my new obsession and it kept my mind off the mound where I went later that morning and opened the knife. I worried about the . . . meat. Was it really healthy? Drying the strips on the top of the plane definitely made them softer to swallow but could they be rapidly going bad at the same time? With my sense of taste almost gone and my sense of smell suspect, I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I’d be struck down with food poisoning for my sins. That would be appropriate enough.
None of these fears stopped me from plunging the knife in deep and hacking away. This time it was easier to overcome my revulsion but inside I was just as torn between conscience and necessity. I tried to think of it like the Holy Communion I’d taken in church as a teenager. The minister at the front would say something like; “When Christ died he gave his body for us so that we could have spiritual life forever.” Perhaps María was giving me her body so that I could have physical life. I hung onto this thought while I swallowed the shreds and sucked on snow to help them down.
As soon as that task was over, my thoughts returned to planning my walk to freedom. The valley I was in ran east and it would have been relatively easy to walk in that direction. But my instincts told me that I had almost succeeded in crossing the mountains. Another ten minutes of flying time and we’d probably have been safe. María would still be alive and we’d be together.
Through slit eyes I studied the mountains to the west. They presented a solid towering wall that, if I chose that direction, I’d somehow have to get over. It would be even colder up there and I’d need extra clothing to survive the extreme night-time chill. I went back to the snowy mound and stripped María’s body. She was a lot slimmer than me, of course. I tore the seams of her clothes until I was sure that some of them would fit underneath my own and supply me with a couple of extra layers. Again María was supplying my needs, always María.
I was convinced that I had to go up the sheer western slope and down the other side. My fate would be decided by what I found there.
The next day I checked my body and found that the patchwork of scratches, scrapes and bruises were starting to heal. I couldn’t see any signs of infection in any of the open sores. The swellings were going down. After a bit of stretching I could now walk fairly normally rather than hobble about, as I’d been doing since the avalanche.
I decided on an exploratory walk west, to discover how my body would cope as much as anything else. Every twenty or thirty steps I was forced to stop and rest, wait for my heart to beat normally again. Soon the slope seemed almost vertical and I had to clutch at the snow with my hands. My casual shoes, which I was terrified might split and fall apart, were no match for the deep snow drifts and my feet were soon sodden and freezing.
The broken sunglasses tumbled off my face again for about the twentieth time and I cursed under my breath as I groped for the left and right halves. I had joined them back together with a small strip of my precious duct tape but they kept coming apart and falling off. Now, even worse, the right lens popped right out and fell somewhere around my feet. I felt around the surface snow and couldn’t find it. It had to be there somewhere. Swearwords tumbled from my mouth and white hot anger surged up in my chest, matching the whiteness all around. My hands roamed around and around, digging, excavating, fingers filtering. Where is the damned thing?
I kept searching until my head began to swim with fatigue and frustration. Tears streamed down my face and I pounded the snow angrily with my fists. I knew I was acting out of all proportion to the loss but couldn’t stop cursing myself for having tramped on it and buried it deeper.
Exhausted, I sat down, no longer caring that I might be sitting on the lens. So be it. I would just have to do without it. Minutes later, I staggered to my feet and peered upwards. But even screwing up my ey
es and squinting into the snow glare still left me blinded and stumbling along.
After about an hour I came upon a rock and noticed that the snow around it was melting. I threw myself down and sucked up the drops. There was green-gray lichen on one side and I scraped it into my mouth. It tasted of soil and I had to spit it out again. I leaned my back against the rock and rested some more, then started back. The wrecked Cessna seemed a tiny speck, almost indistinguishable from the snow mounds.
I carried on for another half an hour until I came to a small hillock where the snow was blown away, revealing more bare rock. No water drops to lick up this time. I slumped down behind the mound, sheltering myself from the strong, ice-chilled wind, and closed my eyes to rest them. By this point in the day the snow was so soft that I was sinking to my knees and I knew there was no going further. I rested until I started to shiver then started back.
By the time I got to the plane the sun was low and I was utterly exhausted. I drank a bottle of water and, as soon as I was able, went over to the food mound and began to cut up some meat. Doing so was as repugnant as ever but, to my surprise and shame, a calmer part of my mind was already thinking in terms of where best to insert the knife to hack out prime ‘cuts’. I recalled that the liver contained vitamins, so found it and carved it out. It was almost black in colour and I forced the hard slivers down my throat there and then.
The heart, kidneys and intestines I would begin on tomorrow. Fatty areas were good for energy but needed to be cut into thin sheets and dried in the sun before consumption. Her head and genitals I would never touch or even uncover.
That night in the dark, even with my eyelids shut tight, I had a permanent milky white film in front of my vision. I bandaged my eyes with a strip of material from one of the seats and collapsed into sleep. I dreamed of home, of the Vancouver skyline, of the Lions Gate Bridge and all the times I’d flown over it. Of all the times I’d wanted to fly under it and had to remind myself that losing my pilot’s license wasn’t a smart option. I must have rolled over at some point as I began to dream that María was lying beside me. We were in a soft bed, naked together, her warm body cupped in my lap. My hand rested on her smooth hip and I murmured something about wanting her to stay. As I caressed her I began to awake. My hand was wrapped around some foam padding I’d ripped from one of the seats.
I wiped away tears drenching my face and fell back into sleep.
Chapter 38
The morning was so cloudy that the water-making pads were useless and I had to make do all day with shaking some crushed snow in the bottles. By now I was convinced that the raw meat was working; making me stronger, helping me walk better, taking away the lack of coordination caused by altitude sickness, and clearing my head. I continued to consider my meagre mealtimes a kind of sacrament, a purely physical version of Holy Communion, food that God had given me because he wanted me to live. It also somehow linked me to María. Perhaps this was only desperate rationalization but it helped to think of it that way.
Thinking was the one thing I did plenty of and, in my still weakened state, sometimes things came to me unbidden. Like photokeratitis, the technical name for snow blindness. I’d been trying to recall this term, off and on, for days. This morning, once I woke, it just popped into my head as if from nowhere. It felt like having bad sunburn on my corneas and more time outdoors would make it even worse. I had to do something about it. Apart from being damned painful, and frankly scary, there was no way I could stumble up and down a mountain near blind, with a permanent milky glare in front of my eyes. Patching up the broken sunglasses hadn’t worked and now I’d lost one of the lenses anyway. Best to give up on them entirely and try something else.
I pondered the problem for a while then took out my precious duct tape. It looked as if there was only about two or three feet of tape left on the roll. I would need every inch of it to attach some kind of snowshoes to my ankles, so I would have to be sparing now. But I had no other option. My Swiss Army knife had a tiny pair of scissors and I used them to cut off two six-inch strips of the gray tape. I stuck these together, sticky sides in, and then cut two narrow slits where my eyes would be. Lastly, I poked a small hole at each end of the duct tape double strip and threaded one of María’s shoelaces through them, tying knots to keep it in place.
Now I had an Inuit-style pair of homemade snow goggles. I tried them on and went outside. They worked pretty well, reducing my eyes’ exposure to sunlight and thus helping to keep my eyeballs from burning any further. I went back inside, cheered up and feeling I’d achieved something. And once again grateful to María for her provision.
In the evening I studied the night sky. In a few days there would be a full moon which would make walking at night-time easier and less dangerous. That’s when I would start my trek west. The surface snow would be hardest then and I could sleep in the sun during the day.
I shivered in the cold air, went back inside the plane and tried to get to asleep. As always, an image of María filled my thoughts and I dreaded dreaming about her again tonight. Instead I found myself thinking about favourite foods. The ones I would eat when I got off the mountain and back to civilisation. Even though I lived alone, I’d never been much of a cook but there were a few things I liked to make. I would sometimes make up a simple batter, using porridge oats, cover a few small fish with it, and pan fry them. Other times I would make a deep dish apple pie, using condensed milk to bind the sliced apples together inside the pastry. And then there were my favourite wines; Blasted Church, Therapy Vineyard’s Freudian Sip, delicious Hawke’s Bay whites from New Zealand.
By now my mouth was salivating and I worried that the release of digestive juices would make me sick, maybe even give me ulcers if I kept it up. By conjuring up an imaginary feast I was just torturing myself, causing myself suffering rather than joy. And what if I began dreaming about these fantasy meals? I pushed the images and made myself think about the reality of raw flesh and fat. It seemed to work and I eventually fell asleep.
I awoke to an odd sound of rumbling outside the plane. Immediately my heart started racing with stark, unconstrainable fear. I started to crawl to the door and then stopped dead as a torrent of what sounded like small rocks rat-a-tat-tatted against the fuselage. One larger rock hit the roof, cracking it, and made me duck my head in terror. The rock fall ended and I could now feel a low, trembling vibration in the distance. I pictured the Cessna’s GPS screen as I was coming down on my last descent and recalled that there was an active peak nearby, called the Tinguiririca volcano. Then that too stopped and I began to unwind my body and breathe more normally.
Even now I couldn’t settle. My nerves were on edge. I was completely strung out and panicked at every little sound, real or imaginary. Sheer loneliness consumed me, as if I was filled with it from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I started crying uncontrollably; convulsing in great spasms of sobbing, gulping, breathless, despairing grief.
I don’t know when or how I stopped. With the dirty rag beneath my head soaked in tears, I passed out in a welcome oblivion of the senses.
In the morning I slept late and awoke feeling strong and optimistic. My trauma of the night before, so all-consuming, now seemed distant and settled. I was now more determined than ever to brave the mountain directly west of me and descend the other side. After the volcanic tremors of last night if it had been possible to start out immediately I would have done so. Impatience, brought on by fear of another avalanche, was beginning to become a problem but I knew I wasn’t ready yet. I still had to get stronger, fitter, more limber after all the bruises, and my eyes needed time to improve too.
I also needed time to prepare my expedition, using everything available. Which meant utilising my natural ingenuity just as I’d done in making the sun shades.
Chapter 39
I’d long since lost track of the days of the week; worse still, of how many days I’d been stuck on the mountain. Three, four weeks? It was forever, a lifetime, and that was long en
ough. Today when I woke a high wind and blizzard was blowing outside the plane and I spent most of the day inside the cabin.
I felt stronger now, with a clear head and energy to burn. I knew not to trust the latter feeling; it had to be deceptive, though there was no way I could tell by how much.
The cuts and bruising had healed up nicely and the stiffness was gone from my leg and arm muscles. I still had one big health problem that I hadn’t been able to beat. In fact, it was only getting worse.
My diet of raw meat, fat and melted snow kept me alive but it was anything but balanced. After several long, disappointing sessions crouched over my latrine hole at the front of the plane, I realised I had chronic constipation. No amount of grunting, pushing or cursing helped. Day after day went by without anything but urine passing out of my body. With meat going in and nothing coming out, I began to fear that something really bad was bound to happen soon – my intestines would split and I’d die in terrible agony from internal bleeding.
I managed to scrape a little oil off the body fat, mixed it with water and used it as a laxative. It was nowhere near enough and didn’t do any good. In sheer desperation I broke a short metal spar off the plane, about the length of a soup spoon, and used it to try to prise out faeces. It left me bloody and hurting but didn’t work.
Alone and in constant fear, with a life or death expedition ahead of me, the constipation became my major preoccupation. The day after the poking failure I squatted down, determined to defecate. I recited you can do it, you can do it, you can do it, over and over again, and pushed until my head got dizzy. Pushing so hard was another worry but I had zero choice. Just as I prepared to give up, I felt something happen. I gave another almighty push and finally something came out.
Shadow of a Killer Page 13