He swings, the serrated blade punching through the side of her neck, Ron temporarily blinded by warm mist from the severed artery, the ice ax all the way through. He tries to grip the rubber-coated handle to rip it out, but the blood has made it slippery and the Viking Goddess slides away from him, still skiing down the street, her hands trying to extract the blade.
Ron wipes the blood out of his eyes, and fifty yards up the street, sees a herd of people make a wide, sliding turn around the corner of Main and 7th, a crowd of thirty or forty tearing down the street after him, screaming, shouting, yeehawing, laughing like a throng of revelers cut loose from the world below.
He runs down to the skier who has fallen over in the snow, sticks his foot against her head for leverage, and jerks the ice ax out of her throat.
Then running again, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, veering into the yard of a private residence, a dog accosting him through a bay window, thinking if he doesn’t find some way to escape his tracks he doesn’t have the faintest hope.
Up ahead, more shapes materialize out of the dark, a dozen perhaps, and smaller, their voices high-pitched—a band of children tramping toward him through the snow.
Ron looks back, can’t see the pursuing crowd through the blizzard, but he can hear them calling out to him.
Twenty feet ahead, on the shore of that frozen pond, his eyes lock on the remnants of a recent battle—saplings thrust into the snow supporting handmade flags (Stars and Stripes vs. the Jolly Roger) and opposing snow forts, their features smoothed and hidden by the storm.
-25-
Ron crawls through a snow trench, his hands aching in the cold, somehow manages to still himself as a collection of footsteps approach.
“I’m cold.”
“Shut up, pussy, if we find him, you know how sweet Christmas will—”
“I’m not a pussy.”
“Okay, twat. Wait, look.”
“That’s just the others.”
An adult male voice shouts, “Hey, who’s there?”
“Just us!”
“Us who?”
“Chris, Neil, Matt, Jacob—”
“What are you kids doing?”
“Helping.”
“No, you’re fucking up the tracks. Shit.”
“What’s wrong, Dave?”
More footsteps arrive.
Ron crawls a little further through the trench, his hair, eyelashes, eyebrows snow-matted, too scared to even register the cold.
The trench leads into a small cave constructed of cantilevered bricks of packed snow, the voices muffled now.
Ron rises up shivering onto his knees. There had been a lookout window, but it’s buried in new snow. He reaches forward, pokes his finger through the soft powder, which all falls in at once.
He ducks down, the voices audible again.
“…little organization would go a long fucking way.”
“Hey, watch the language around the kids, bro.”
“You understand what’ll happen if—”
A woman breaks in, “You’re not thinking, Dave.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What’s his primary objective right now?”
“I don’t know…getting out of town?”
“How? In this storm? With his car toasted? No, he needs to get out of this miserable weather or he’ll freeze to death.”
The voices begin to fade, Ron lifting up, peering through the window, watching the crowd move by, down toward the frozen pond.
Light passes through the window, and he prostrates himself on the floor of the snow cave, listening for some indication he’s been seen.
After a while the voices have vanished completely, and he looks out the window again, the crowd nothing but distant, restless lightbeams, barely visible in the storm.
-26-
Ron massages his bare, blistered feet to get the blood circulating, colder than he’s ever been in his life, though he doesn’t think he’s freezing to death. This little snow fort is actually warm.
He wonders how long he’s been inside—thirty minutes, forty-five tops—and he’s spent most of it trying to convince himself this can’t possibly be happening. He’s had “horror dreams” before—car accidents, the death of friends and family, being chased by a murderous street gang through a parking garage, life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit—but he always wakes up and the fear always leaves.
Even as he sits there, rubbing his cold, wet feet, he has a rock-solid premonition that in mere moments he will wake in that hotel in downtown Flagstaff he and Jessica checked into a little over twenty-four hours ago. It was their first night on the road, and they dined at a gem of a pizza joint near the university, went straight to the hotel, made love, and crashed, tired and giddy with the thrill of finally being on vacation, next stop Colorado.
He tells himself, and he believes, that he still sleeps in that hotel room. He’s really tossing in bed as he hides in this snow cave, Jessica probably kicking him under the covers, swearing at him in that sexy, sleepy voice of hers to quit moving or take his restless ass over to the sleeper sofa.
-27-
Ron inhales the scent of hotel linens and forced air from an unfamiliar central heating system, the covers soft between his legs.
He throws an arm across the mattress, feels the figure of his wife asleep beside him, her naked back rising and falling against his hand.
Later, they sit at breakfast, cream-cheesing bagels.
The light that blazes into the room washes out everything on the periphery and even the rogue strands of Jessica’s hair glow like incandescent silk.
“I had the worst dream last night,” Ron says.
“Tell me about it.”
He thinks for a moment, says, “I forgot.”
“Chilly in here.” As Jessica rubs her arms, Ron notices her breath clouding. He’s grown cold as well. He reaches down to lift his bagel, and it looks like a bagel, the circumference lightly browned, the lox spread warming on the surface, but when he touches it, it crumbles in his fingers like snow, freezing to the touch.
He says, “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Nothing, it’s…everything’s fine.”
“I’m so glad we came on this vacation,” Jessica says, but she’s turned into the Viking Goddess, the ice ax run through her throat, blood pulsing out of the side of her neck and making a sound exactly like a lawn sprinkler.
Ron tries to stand, thinking if he can walk outside into that clear morning light and climb into his Benz, Jessica will be there. He can make this real.
“We have to stretch this out,” he says, but the light passing through the windows has already begun to erode, the darkness encroaching so fast he can no longer see across the table, and then he’s back in the snow cave, curled up against the freezing wall, and so despairing, he believes he’s gone to hell, recalling from his collegiate reading of Dante’s Inferno (as if his subconscious has retrieved the most horribly perfect memory shard just to fuck with him) that the innermost circle of the underworld is built of ice.
-28-
Ron rises up slowly out of the trench.
It has stopped snowing, the sky blackish-cobalt, infected with stars.
He thinks he hears voices on the far side of town, but as he spins slowly around, he sees nothing but dark houses, smoke the only movement, trickling out of chimneys.
-29-
The snow comes to his knees.
He jogs through the powder, staying on the west edge of town where backyards border a stream that has all but frozen over, eyeing the dark windows of the houses he runs by.
The stream curves him back toward Main as he approaches the north edge of town, and ten minutes after striking out from the snow fort, he moves past the city park and the torched Benz, the frame of the SUV having cooled just in time to allow for the collection of a delicate half-inch of powder.