Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller

by John Nicholas

  "Did you find a route?" Anthony asked, with a tone clearly indicating that he could have found a better one.

  "Well, keep the sun on our right, obviously," Alex began, and Anthony nodded, "follow the compass…and look for anything flat. I'm pretty sure the best way is to follow that stream, over that way," he gestured off into the distance.

  Anthony grunted and set off. Alex ran ahead of him and threw out his hands. "Not now! We've been walking all night. Don't you want to rest first?"

  "I guess," Anthony said; and unrolling his sleeping bag, threw it down where he was standing.

  "You two get some sleep as well," Alex called back to Sarah and Hart. Hart walked ahead and lay his bag down near Anthony's. Sarah pitched hers closer to the tracks. This was slightly strange—the nature of their situation usually caused them all to camp together, and closest to whatever reminded them of civilization.

  Alex walked over near Sarah and dropped his backpack and sleeping bag. Then, on a wild impulse, he bounded to the top of the hill again, and stood surveying the wild emptiness that surrounded them. The sun was releasing copious emissaries of itself, rays of light that sped across the plains and turned them green, blue, gold, any number of crazy, beautiful colors. What he saw overwhelmed him, raced through his mind and turned it over and over again, and it was all he could do to keep from shouting aloud. How could he have, in his wildest dreams, ever believed he could be here? No matter what had happened, how lucky was he to be standing here now, seeing these prairies reveal themselves in splendor, living a life that he himself had built?

  Around noon he awoke with a start. He'd had a dream that was almost an exact copy of the one he'd had in Porcupine: the same dark passage, the glimmer of light, the strangling hand—and what was easily the most unsettling feature, that of standing in a deserted village during a blizzard. Was it a real place? Where was it? Had he ever been there?

  A hanging question, Alex thought, is always worse than any answer you can give.

  He turned over and saw, to his surprise, that Sarah was lying awake as well. He rolled onto his back and searched for the sun. It appeared to be about three in the afternoon.

  "Sarah?" he said softly.

  She jumped in her sleeping bag. "Don't do that!" she hissed.

  "Sorry! Christ!" he said. She rolled to face away from him. Finally he said, "So…what's keeping you up?"

  "You first," she said, turning on her back again.

  "Weird dreams," he muttered. "Nothing particularly special. What about you?"

  "Nothing. Just, you know…thinking."

  "About?" he said, teasing slightly.

  "Nothing!"

  "What?"

  "Nothing!" she yelled, almost laughing herself now. "Well…" she quickly sobered again. "I was just thinking about…about those guys we killed at the river. Who were they? I mean, what were their names? Did they have wives? Girlfriends? Families? What were their favorite movies? And what…what…"

  "—what made them become who they were?" Alex finished.

  "Well…yeah," Sarah said.

  "I know what you mean," Alex replied, dropping his gaze and turning over to look at some clouds drifting in from the east, chasing down the sun. "There was one of them—the leader, I think. He looked—this is really stupid—he looked like my old French teacher."

  "Maybe they were brothers," Sarah said, with a hint of sarcasm she quickly tried to disguise.

  "I thought that too. And I thought, if they were, what made this one a middle school teacher and that one a Moose Killer?"

  "You're not actually going to try to know, are you? Did you ever consider it might have been fate?"

  "I don't believe in fate. It's a completely ridiculous concept. The future hasn't happened yet."

  "I didn't really expect you to."

  "But these people…" Alex murmured, with a searching note in his voice, "what makes them? To us they're nothing more than moving targets, but…"

  "Alex, can we talk about something else? This is making me feel a bit…" she was unable to find the word, "…a bit uneasy."

  "Maybe that's how we should feel!" The words came out louder than Alex had intended. He turned over to face her. "These killers—somebody had to have been their mother and father, and they must have had hometowns, and best friends when they were little—"

  "Alex!" Sarah shouted. "Stop it!"

  "—and—and they might have had first times at the beach, and first kisses, and they'd have been through high school and college—"

  "Alex, please!" Sarah said, almost pleading.

  "They got screwed over by the system maybe, or life just beat them at their own game—and then they wound up with the Moose Killers and their families worried about them every night—and then—and then some damn kid just went and shot them!"

  Sarah was drawing deep, slow breaths. Forgetting all that was surrounding her, she turned over, put a hand on Alex's shoulder, and looked into his eyes.

  "I'm not saying you're wrong," she told him. "But thinking like this…it doesn't help anything. It won't change anything. And at this point…" she trailed off and began again. "At this point all we can do is believe we're the good guys."

  She stopped. Alex looked back at her, and wondered if it was selfish of him to enjoy, regardless of what they'd done, this evanescent moment hovering between them.

  Sarah managed to sleep soon after that, but Alex lay awake for a while longer, until just before sunset, wondering what had come over him and made him ask the questions he had. Finally he drifted into an uneasy quasi-rest.

  As he awoke, the sun was sweeping down the lower end of its arc and descending below the horizon again, painting the sky with a richer palette than in the morning. He squinted, rubbed his eyes, and blinked a few times, then looked around to see if Sarah was still asleep. The quick turning of his head made him a bit dizzy so he sat still for a while until his mind could activate.

  It was then that he noticed the light reflecting off something hanging in front of him, forming a short beam of bright glare. He shielded his eyes and glanced around. When he saw Anthony's face and his hand holding whatever was reflecting, he jumped backwards and landed on his hands.

  "Anthony—"

  "Get up," Anthony spat.

  "Are you all right?"

  "I am not all right. Get up right now or you won't be either."

  Finally Alex's pupils shrank and his eyes focused in front of him. Anthony was holding a long, thin strip of metal by the handle—a rusty knife, notched with scars from fights long since won and lost. Alex started when he saw it and began to reflexively crawl backwards.

  "What the hell are you thinking? Did we get attacked?"

  "We will!" Anthony roared, with such ferocity Alex swore he was in actual pain. "We're goddamn well going to be!"

  Alex remembered who was supposed to have the upper hand and stopped crawling backwards, instead pushing himself to a halfway standing position. Seeing Anthony's crazed stare he moved into a guarded stance.

  "Hart, take his stuff," Anthony called over his shoulder. Hart jumped down from the tracks and slung Alex's backpack over his shoulder before going to stand by Anthony.

  "Anthony, what the hell is wrong with you!?" Alex said, frustrated, imploringly.

  "Let me tell you," Anthony shot back with a voice like a firing gun. "Let me tell you that I heard everything you and your girlfriend were talking about last night—morning—whatever."

  Alex almost lunged at him but pulled himself back in time. Anthony was his ally! How could he have been listening in on his conversations?

  "And when I tell you, maybe you'll realize that we can't fight killers thinking like that. Maybe you'll remember that you don't have a plan and that's almost as bad as when you did have one. Maybe you'll learn that Anthony Anderson has built himself on not taking crap from people and that he doesn't intend to start now, not for some raging dreamer slash vigilante slash idiot."

  For the first time, Alex looked at Anthony
and saw everything about him: the prison of persona that he had built himself into brick by brick his whole life, the foolhardy bravery that he could find nothing to do but test to ever more dangerous limits, his inner rage at seeing anything or everything collapse around him, and yet, his desperation for that very thing to happen.

  "Where did you get that knife?" he asked.

  "I won a fight in Niagara," Anthony answered. "You thought I'd go with you unarmed?"

  Suddenly Alex knew something else.

  "The knife gave you that scar, didn't it?"

  Anthony was silent.

  "You won it, you hid it somewhere, probably buried it," Alex said, the typical coolness entering his voice now, "then you took it back so you could slit my throat when you got sick of me."

  "When you do what I do, you don't give up a weapon," Anthony said, equally cool.

  Alex took a small step forward. "You were selling drugs, weren't you?"

  "Aren't you clever!?" Anthony retorted, extending his knife arm to its full length. "It's too late to be clever, Alex. You broke your promise. You told me I won that race."

  "Funny," Alex muttered. "With all the near-death experiences, it sort of slipped my mind."

  "It's not even about that!" Anthony roared again with the ferocity of a tiger just released from its cage. "I'm tired of you breaking promises! I'm tired of you letting us drop, one by one, like flies! I'm tired of slogging for hundreds of miles through Canada's lower armpit! And I have gone too…freaking…long without a cigarette!"

  It was beginning to dawn on Alex exactly what Anthony wanted from him.

  "You can't seriously kick me out," Alex said, fighting to stop his voice and resolve from wavering. "You'll freeze to death in twelve hours."

  "I can," Anthony said, so flatly that it was even more terrifying than his roar. Running out of options, Alex turned to Hart.

  "Hart," he said, ghosts of pleading breaking through his voice. "Hart, you don't agree with him, do you?"

  "Yeah," Hart said firmly. "Let's face it, Alex. There's death behind every tree. You're the one they're looking for. Without you the three of us will have a much better chance of survival. And you know," he said, with the air of bolting down his wits, "leader or not, you really are just dead weight."

  Alex's blood boiled, but behind it, the phrase "three of us" triggered something in his mind.

  "Sarah!" he called out randomly. "What the hell did you do to her!?" he growled, rounding on Anthony, who swiftly kicked him in the shin, causing him to buckle. "If you hurt her—"

  "Isn't that sweet?" Anthony snarled. "Only knocked out, that's all. Once she comes around she'll side with us. But you'd better not be here when she does."

  Hart came up beside Anthony, holding something large and heavy. Alex noticed: it was the rifle they'd taken at the Saskatchewan River. Hart held it out.

  "Hart, what the hell are you doing? We need all of those," Anthony said angrily.

  "Christ, Anthony, I'm on your side, but do you want him to die?" Hart replied. He pushed the rifle toward Alex, who grabbed it. Instantly, the knife shot up and pressed against his neck.

  "Hold a gun on him," Anthony ordered, and Hart obeyed, producing one of the other two pistols from his pocket and cocking it. When Alex looked down the barrel, cold reality struck him in the face, and he turned on the spot so as not to be subjected to any more.

  "Start walking," he heard Anthony bark. "If I ever see you again, that'll be the last time that bleeding heart of yours ever beats."

  Alex was indeed walking, and looking up into the sky to see that the sun was now gone under a heavy bank of approaching clouds. It would be snowing soon—could the snow clean him? Cure him? Can it, at the very least, disguise me? Can snow hide this crap all over my soul?

  He turned around and saw Hart still aiming the pistol at him, and Anthony with the knife arm still raised, silently ordering him to keep walking. How did it happen? How did I fall so low? How did I fail?

  And with that last word, it was as if his bones had been plunged into quicksand and pulled back out, as if his entire being was strapped with weights. Walking through the windswept field became a death march, and the gathering clouds rose father. Failure, he thought. Pain, suffering, death, all kinder words. Failure is an evil word.

  And as his thoughts disintegrated, unable to comprehend their own destruction, he was left only with the desperate, hopeless desire to see Sarah one more time, the last true connection he had in the world. But he knew, as he looked at the rifle in his hands, turned back, and saw Hart and Anthony out of range, breaking camp, gathering supplies, that he would be denied even this. It would start snowing soon.

  CHAPTER 24

  The World Frozen

  Hart dropped the pistol to his waist the moment he saw Alex's shadowy figure fade into cluster of trees that was the furthest thing he could see. Anthony had taken Alex's backpack and was now rifling through it, searching for anything useful. "Look at this," he growled, holding up a pair of empty, unmarked cans. "Look what we wasted on him. We should have done this sooner."

  "Why did you make me do it?"

  Anthony paused, and looked up into Hart's eyes. "Well, you agreed, didn't you?"

  "You didn't need me for that. All I did was hold the gun."

  "Hart," Anthony sighed, standing up, "it was either this or wind up like Sarah. Which would you prefer?"

  "I don't think you know what you've done," Hart replied, turning away. "I think we've killed him."

  "So?"

  Hart turned again and caught Anthony's eye. He suddenly recoiled as he realized what he'd seen—it was himself, two weeks ago. He walked off toward the tracks and pulled out the iron compass, absentmindedly watching the needle swing back and forth. "When do we leave?" he asked, getting no reply. "When do we leave?" he repeated, more loudly. He glanced back at Anthony and saw him rifling violently through the backpack that they had designated for items that weren't food, the same one they'd pulled the rope from hours before. "What's up?" he asked.

  "The bastard!" Anthony shouted, the exclamation hitting Hart as though he had been punched in the face. "That…god…damn…"

  "Anthony! Get a grip!"

  "He took it!" Anthony roared. "It was here before and now it's gone! He took it!"

  "Cool it!" Hart said, pulling the backpack away and grabbing Anthony by the shoulders. "Who took what?"

  "Our best friend Alex seems to have made off with our map!" Anthony snarled, reeling away from Hart.

  Hart was taken aback. "How could he have? We were watching the whole time—we didn't let him near the—it's impossible! It must be somewhere else!"

  "It doesn't matter how! We don't have it! Either someone took it, or we just lost it, and either way nobody without that map is going to be finding their way anywhere out here!"

  What happened next to Hart was strange. He suddenly found himself wondering if he'd changed at all—did he genuinely want to renounce his life of violence, or did he just want to prove himself to the one who'd defeated him? Then he realized something else: Alex was gone. There was no reason for Hart McGee to be anybody other than what he'd always been. And then he felt the old weight returning to his spirit, that weight which was at the same time liberation, a feeling that there was something to him. As he recalled his old life he slipped further away, remembering the joys of a fight, his old two-room house—

  —and wandering to the mountains at night—

  —and the way it had felt to live for nobody, to lean on nobody but Hart McGee, and the more he thought the more he remembered—and then Hart was the other Hart again.

  "I think I know who can tell us where it is," he said, a grin breaking over his face.

  The day before they'd come for Sarah before Alex, afraid that she would help him if he tried to resist. They hadn't given her the chance to run, but had instead dragged her, still half-asleep, to the top of the wooded hill. There, Anthony had dug rope out of the backpack, sat Sarah with her back against a tr
ee, pulled her arms around behind the trunk, and tied her wrists together, ensuring that she couldn't come to Alex's aid. It was in this fashion that she was still bound, awaiting her release, when Anthony decided it was time to keep moving.

  "You bastard!" she shouted when they approached, struggling in vain against the ropes and straining away from the tree.

  "Until now I was thinking of letting you go," Anthony said with a sneering tone. "But you're being kind of rude. And there's something I need to ask you about."

  "What did you do to Alex?" Sarah spat.