Mountain Madness (36 page)

Warren wasn’t sure how long it took him to get to the truck—several minutes at least, although it felt like much longer. The storm had taken a turn for the nasty, and the snow smacking him in the face wasn’t the least bit soft or fluffy. Bits of ice rained down on him and into him, seeming to come from every direction at once. He used the shovel to brace himself when the wind gusted or he came across an extra slippery patch of ground, and although he nearly fell once or twice, he managed to avoid it. Barely.

He circled the GMC to let himself in through the passenger-side door. The snow hadn’t piled up as badly on that side, had come up only to the wheel wells, in fact. Once Warren used the ice-scraper to chip away most of the ice holding the door shut, it opened with relatively little fight. He leaned the shovel against the truck and crawled into the cab.

Out of the wind, the storm didn’t seem quite so bad. Cold, sure—disgustingly cold—but no colder than it had been a million times before. He sat there for a moment, unable to see out through the snow-covered windows, wisps of smokey breath drifting out of his mouth, feeling claustrophobic but happy to have escaped the swirling snow and biting ice. At least for a minute.

But he couldn’t stay still for long. As his body relaxed, the warmth seeped out and the cold snuck in. He felt it around his neck and in the cuffs between his gloves and sleeves, felt it wrapping itself around him, squeezing, like a snake.

He shivered, rubbed his arms, and reached for the keys.

He couldn’t find them at first; for one frightening moment, he thought he must have dropped them somewhere between the house and the truck. If that had happened, he might never have seen the things again. But the keys were there, tucked so deep in the pocket of his snowsuit that he couldn’t get to them without taking off his glove and going in barehanded. He pulled the ring out, poked the GMC’s key into the ignition, and twisted.

Nothing.

He frowned and tried again.

Twist.

Nothing.

Turn.

Bupkis.

He put his glove back on and stared at the dashboard. As if a warning light might come on and tell him what had gone wrong.

Could cold weather keep the truck from starting? He wasn’t sure. He’d never pretended to be a mechanic. He knew how to fill the vehicle with gas and which of the pedals was the brake, but he was pretty clueless otherwise. He could admit it and wasn’t ashamed. Not everybody could know everything about everything. Engines had never been one of his specialties.

Still, expert or not, he knew he’d started the truck when it had been this cold before. Colder even. He tried the key one more time and shook his head when nothing happened.

He wondered if maybe he ought to look under the hood.

What good would that do?

At least he could see if there was something obviously wrong. A broken hose or a corroded battery.

Do you remember the snow? There’s at least a foot of it out there on that hood. You’re going to shovel it all off for what’s bound to be a useless look at the engine?

Yes, he was. Tess had been in an accident. His
wife
had been in an accident. He wasn’t going to risk complications to her condition to avoid some manual labor. What kind of sorry excuse for a husband
would
?

He left the keys in the ignition and let himself out of the truck. The storm hit him harder than ever. The wind had stopped gusting and seemed to be blowing with a constant intensity Warren had never experienced, the kind of thing you might see in news footage of a hurricane. He ducked his head, grabbed the shovel, and went to work.

It was hard to judge how long it took to clean off the hood. Partly because his watch was on the nightstand in their bedroom, but mostly because he had to pause so often to huddle against the blizzard. By the time he’d finished, cleared off all but the last few patches of ice (and the new snow already covering up what he’d just cleared off), he felt cold, sore, and beaten. Like he’d been raped by a yeti.

He ducked back into the GMC’s cab, popped the hood, and then worked on prying the thing up. Thanks to his clumsy, gloved fingers, it took much longer than it probably should have, but he didn’t dare take the gloves off, even for a second. In this weather, that would have been an open invitation to a nasty case of frostbite.

When he wedged the ice-scraper beneath one side of the hood and finally levered it up, it popped and crunched and cracked. But it opened. Sure enough.

He lifted the hood and ducked his head beneath.

No. That’s not possible.

The engine was a ruined mess. Chunks of ice hung from tattered rubber hoses and poked out of cracked fluid reservoirs. Warren wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking at, which was the oil tank and which the wiper fluid reservoir, whether that hunk of metal in the middle was the starter or the alternator. Cracked metal casings bulged in places they shouldn’t have.

Could ice have gotten into the engine? So much ice that it distorted steel? Was that even physically possible?

He recognized the battery (although it was encased in a block of thick ice and distinguishable only because of the red and black cables jutting from the top), a thing he’d managed to jump once or twice over the years, and he knew the coiled apparatus in front was the radiator, but it also had jags of ice that shouldn’t have been there—that
couldn’t
have been there—and cracked bulges with veins of frost running into (or maybe out of?) them.

He shook his head.

This didn’t seem possible, but what was he going to believe, common sense or his own damn eyes? He knew only that the engine was useless like this, completely worthless. Whether they wanted to or not, whether there’d ever been any kind of chance of driving out of the mountains anyway, he and Tess weren’t going anywhere now.

He shut the hood and climbed back into the cab for the keys, but what good were the keys? The truck wouldn’t be moving from that spot until long after the storm ended, until they could get a tow truck up here to drag it back to town. Might as well leave the keys there; one less thing to keep track of, one less thing to lose in the storm.

So he turned back to the house instead and trudged through the snow.

What if Tess takes a turn for the worse? What exactly are you going to do then?

What
could
he do except hope it didn’t happen? If they’d had a phone, maybe he could have called for help—although the chances of an emergency vehicle making it up the mountain were even worse than their chances had been of making it
down
, and no helicopter would have dared this weather, not even for the worst kind of emergency, let alone a broken window and a few cuts—but they had no phone; there were no cell towers this far up the mountains, and although their landlines were partially buried, there were still stretches of above-ground lines, and they never lasted long in a bad storm. Warren had tried the phone on the first day of the blizzard and got nothing but silence. 

He stepped through a drift with his shoulders hunched. Around him, the blizzard blew its freezing breath, wheezing at him.

Laughing at him.

5

IN THE BACK
yard, in a furrow between two drifts, the wind blew across a patch of bluish-white snow. Loose powder drifted across the top, but there was only solid ice beneath. The wind gusted, and the ice trembled. A section of ice broke loose from the rest—now less solid looking, almost mushy—and rose into the air. It was long, cylindrical, finger like. Only longer. Tentacle like. The wind blew harder still, and the tentacle curled into a stumpy question mark of a thing.

When the wind died down, the curl of ice stayed where it was for a moment, but then it drooped, twitched, and finally stilled.

Fresh snow fell and hid any signs of the movement.

6

THERE WAS A
problem. Tess knew it immediately. Warren had never been any good at hiding his emotions. Even with half his face buried in his scarf, Tess knew he was worried. She saw it in his eyes, in the slump of his shoulders.

She didn’t say anything until he’d made it all the way inside and shoved the door closed. It took him two tries to do this; the snow had spilled through the doorway and formed a kind of wedge, and he had to push on the door with his shoulder to get it to latch.

Bub got up from his bed and limped over to Warren, and Warren scratched him on the head before pulling off his outerwear.

“Too much snow? Are we stuck?”

Warren wiped layers of melting snow and ice off his face and flicked the mess to the floor. “I don’t know. Probably, but I couldn’t even get the truck started to find out.” He unwound his scarf, dropped it to the floor, and pulled off his cap. His hair—almost entirely gray now, but still fairly thick—had matted and taken on an oily, unwashed look, although Tess knew he’d showered just that morning. She’d picked his damp towel off the floor.

“What’s wrong with it?”

He turned his palms up and raised his eyebrows. “You know me. I normally don’t know a cracked block from a loose fuse, but I took a look under the hood, and…”

“And what?”

He stepped out of his boots and joined her at the fire. He moved the items from the second chair to the floor and sat down with a huff. Bub followed him, circled the area in front of the fire for a second, and then curled up at Warren’s feet.

“Have you ever heard of an engine freezing?”

Tess shook her head, felt a twinge in her neck, like a cut opening back up, and decided to try moving as little as possible. “No,” she said. “Like the gas?”

“Not the gas. I think it has to get a
lot
colder for that to happen. I mean the actual engine. The mechanical parts. Like the battery and the fuel injector and whatever the hell else is in there.”

“No, I’ve never heard of anything like that. Is that what happened?”

He rubbed his hands together and held them toward the fire.

“Honestly, I don’t know
what
happened. There was ice everywhere in there. The tubes were cracked and broken, the fluid tanks were destroyed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the thing had been…sabotaged.”

“Sabotaged? With ice? Who would do that?”

He looked at her and took a deep breath. “Outside of a bad Batman villain, I have no idea, which is why I don’t think that’s what happened.”

She twisted in her chair, leaned toward him. “Hold on a second. What if someone
did
. For whatever reason. I know you don’t believe I saw a person through the window, not really, but what if there
was
someone out there? What if they’re
still
out there? Did you check for footprints?”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “No, I forgot. I’m sorry. But I can guarantee you there’s no one outside. It’s nasty out there. I mean
really
nasty. Almost unbearable. No one could last more than a few hours in that mess without freezing to death. Maybe not even half an hour.”

“Then maybe they haven’t been out in it the whole time. Maybe they’ve been hiding in the shed.”

He shook his head. “I was just in the shed. Nobody’s been out there but me and Bub.”

“The garage then.”

He turned his chair to face hers and leaned forward on her knees. “But why would anybody do that? Break the kitchen window? Freeze—somehow—the truck engine? Why not just break in and rob us or kill us or whatever it is they have in mind? Why just…mess with us?”

She turned back to the fire. She didn’t have an answer to that one.

“Plus,” Warren said, “there was snow on the hood.”

“Huh?”

His eyes were wide, like he’d just solved some kind of problem.

“Yeah. Snow on the hood. A lot of snow. And no footprints anywhere around it. Whatever happened to the engine, it happened before the snow started. Or at least before the storm really got going.”

“That was four days ago.”

He nodded. “Exactly. Nobody would have frozen the engine and then waited around for four days to break the kitchen window just to…what, scare us?”

Tess said, “Nobody sane anyway.”

He nodded his head and flapped a hand at her, a gesture that said,
I’ll give you that one.

“So what do we do now?”

Warren sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “It’s getting dark out,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much we
can
do except cover the kitchen window, put an extra blanket on the bed, and try to stay warm until morning.”

“And then?”

“In the morning, I’ll check around the house and in the garage, make sure there’s
not
some psycho stalking the place.”

“And then?”

He laughed. “Let’s get to tomorrow first and go from there.”

Before she could say anything else, Warren got up and put another log on the fire. The flames wrapped around the new wood, flickering, licking. Tess sat still and enjoyed the heat.

“I’m going to tape up the window,” Warren said. “Back in a jiff.”

When he was gone, something slid down the side of her face. At first, she thought it must be a tear—although she wasn’t exactly teary—but when she reached up and wiped it away, her finger came back with a smear of red on it.

Blood.

One of her cuts had reopened.

She wiped up the blood with the towel Warren had brought her earlier, folded the towel in half, and then folded it in half again, hiding the blood from sight, pretending she’d never seen it at all.

7

YOU KNOW THE
feeling you get when someone shoots you in the back with a cannonball? Warren had it.

He should have known shoveling the snow off the GMC after hauling around firewood after fighting his way through snowdrifts all day would take its toll, but he hadn’t felt the muscle twinges until he came inside and warmed up. Maybe the pain was just now setting in, or maybe the blizzard had numbed him to it. Either way, it was here now, coming in long, agonizing waves.