Hell Is Empty

8

West Tensleep Lake is almost a mile long, large for the high country of the Bighorn Mountains. I was now traveling across it and soon to be in direct violation of the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1984 designation of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area; they could ticket me if they could find me.

The center of the lake had been whitewashed, and the surface was a reflective sheen of about sixteen inches of solid ice, easily capable of holding the weight of the Thiokol and the Arctic Cat. They’d traveled to the center of the lake and then continued north to where it tapered into its source.

I slowed the machine as I got to the place where the hillsides rose and narrowed and where the snow grew steadily deeper. The wind had refilled the tracks where the big Spryte had gone, but now there was an uneven surface underneath that would suddenly send the Cat lurching to one side or the other and almost yank the handlebars out of my hands.

Lifting the amber-tinted goggles onto my forehead, I slowed and stared at the terrain ahead-everything had a flat, gray quality. The snow had stopped somewhat; the sun was just up, although behind a thin cloud cover, and I was glad to see its opaque glow, hoping it might lift the mercury above zero and ground some of the blowing snow. Closing my eyes for just a second, I stood there on the running boards of the Cat and soaked in a little of the warmth from the sun. I took a deep breath and thought about the figures I’d seen back at the turnaround and wondered if they might’ve been the ones Hector had warned me about in his phone call. I didn’t allow myself to dwell on the subject for too long.

I could see where Tensleep Creek stretched to the right and then rounded to the left before continuing north. The snow would get deeper, but anywhere the Thiokol could go, I could follow.

I hit the accelerator and carefully picked my way through the miniature pass, getting to another flat and following the creek bed.

I was trying to remember what the area looked like before being smothered in layer after layer of snow, but my last trip had been in the fall two years ago. I had been up the mountain since then on a fishing trip with Henry, but that had been on the Dry Fork near Burgess Junction on the Sheridan side of the mountain.

Originally the Crow called the mountains Basawaxaawuua, or White Mountains, but when Lewis and Clark reported on the vast herds of bighorn sheep at the mouth of the nearby Big Horn River, the range received its modern name, rivers being ever so much more important to explorers than peaks.

Recreation wasn’t my game, and that was probably why I had only a vague memory of having been up here in something other than a crisis situation. I thought there was a boulder field to my right, with scree leading down to the waterline. Better to avoid that; I kept to the left and puttered around the corner.

There was another straightaway, and I could still see where the Thiokol had burst through the drift at the other end. I rose up on the handlebars and floorboards again so that I could see exactly where it had gone. It was at that moment I thought I heard something-something louder than the exhaust on the Cat and not musical. I sat back down, but something felt strange on the saddle. I rose up a little and glanced back at the black seat, where I saw that there was a large rip in the vinyl.

I twisted the bars again in an attempt to track the snow machine to the right and under the lip of the ridge so that I might be protected from whoever was shooting, but another round went through the plastic of one of the front fenders and I lost control. The big red contraption heaved up the steep incline of the hillside like an eight-hundred-pound bronco and casually rolled sideways, landing on top of me.

I scrambled to get out from beneath it before it settled but only succeeded in catching the bottom of the Cordura pant on a peg on the other side. I bent my leg so that it wouldn’t break. The snow was relatively soft underneath, but the ATV’s crossbar struck me in the face and sunk me.

I lay there trying to pull my leg and left arm free, but nothing would budge. I pulled my hat from my head and yanked the goggles down to my neck with my right hand, frantically searching the ridge above to see from where they were firing, but there was only the gray of the clouded, early-morning sky.

Nothing.

If they were making their way to me, I had only a few moments to prepare. The Sharps was still lodged in the case and snowpack, so my only option was the Colt in my holster. I yanked the glove from my hand with my teeth, spitting it to the side. I breathed a quick cloud of relief as I unsnapped and drew the. 45 and clicked off the safety.

They would be to the left from where I’d rolled, and from the angle of deflection they must’ve been above. If they were smart they’d approach me from ground level at the frozen creek, but if they didn’t want to wade through the drifts, they’d stay on the ridge where they’d have to reveal themselves before they could take another shot.

I aligned the barrel of the Colt through the overturned tracks of the Cat, close to the undercarriage where it might not be so noticeable, and carefully reached up to where the kill switch was and turned the thousand cc’s off; evidently, Omar didn’t believe in safety lanyards. I smelled gas and couldn’t afford to just let the thing run. Let them wonder if it had cut out on its own.

It was quiet, except for the wind and the swaying of the trees, and I kept my attention on the ridge that was only thirty feet away, allowing my eyes to go unfocused, evolving into motion detectors. I thought I might’ve heard some noise; I waited, but it was quiet again, and I took my eyes away just long enough to assess my situation.

Screwed, pretty much, as Vic would say.

The big pack had borne the brunt of the impact on my back, but my head and shoulder had taken the front. I could feel something wet trailing down from my forehead and into my eye socket, something wet and warm.

My hand was beginning to shake from lack of blood, bad positioning, and the adrenaline rush that was still blistering through my veins. I breathed as shallowly as I could, attempting not to sound like a derailed locomotive, and waited.

It was possible that there were more than one of them, and in that case I might have the barrel of another pistol aimed at the back of my head. Maybe I was wrong about the deflection, and they were farther ahead or more to the rear.

I smiled to myself, just the tiniest grin of bitter acknowledgment of the fact that I was the prey and falling victim to the voices of the second guess. These voices are the ones that rabbits and mice hear when they think they are safely underneath the sagebrush, but they hear the hoot of an owl or the screech of an eagle that sets them to wondering if this patch of cover they’ve got is good enough or if they should make a run for it-maybe that patch over there is better.

Then they move.

Then they die.

I could afford to stay still and ignore the voices-I had. 45 teeth.

There was another sound, coming from where I’d expected it, faint and up on the ridge. I was really shaking now with the exertion of holding my arm steady. I took another short breath and slowly let it out, wondering how long I could stay like this. I figured it had been about five minutes since my pileup.

Movement.

The pistol was the first thing I saw, which was a mistake on his part, because now there would be no hesitation in my response. I had been shot at twice; they hadn’t said anything and were now approaching me armed. I figured the response I had in mind was prudent and reasonable.

I waited-they might’ve been able to see part of the wreckage, but it was possible they still couldn’t see all of me.

A few tiny pieces of snow broke from the ridge and tumbled down the hillside in a miniature avalanche. I saw a knit cap, and the face underneath had a beard. I was sure it was one of the convicts from the Ameri-Trans van-the one with the long hair.

There was a second’s pause and another round blew into the ice and snow behind me.

I fired.

It’s never a pretty sight; his head yanked back and then fell forward, blood leaking onto the snow and sliding down the slope along with the pistol that now lay halfway in the ten yards between us.

I dropped my arm and just lay there breathing. Still holding the Colt, I wiped my face and could see the blood on the back of my hand, but there wasn’t too much. I pushed down with my elbow and was able to make a pocket where I could slide out my other arm. I stretched it, getting some feeling back in my hand, and stared at the man’s head. I decided I should check. I raised the. 45 and yelled, “Hey!”

He didn’t move, and I fought against the sickness that always overtook me.

“Hey, are you dead?” I glanced around and assessed my predicament. “Because if you aren’t you can help get this four-wheeler off me.”

It would appear that I was on my own.

The way the big machine had flipped, I was pretty much buried in the snowbank but could still feel something solid against my trapped leg. If I was lucky, the hard thing I could feel was just snow frozen in the serrated layers of thaw/freeze. If I was unlucky, it was one of those boulders I’d been thinking about earlier. I shoved the. 45 back into my holster and tried to rock the snow machine. I figured that even if I got it to roll over me and the rest of the way down the bank, it was better than just lying there like an indisposed turtle.

I pushed, but there wasn’t any way to get solid purchase and nothing moved. I tried again, finally throwing my head back in the trough it had formed and staring at the leaden sky. “You have got to be kidding.”

I slipped my glove back on and started digging under the saddle and around my leg and could smell the gas and see where it was leaking. I wasn’t sure if the tank had been ruptured or if one of the fuel lines had been cut or partially torn loose. It wasn’t a lot of gas, but it was gas and the fumes were strong.

My position was awkward, and I wasn’t able to get at much of the snow below my leg, but when I finally got to my knee, I could tell that although my leg hadn’t broken, it was securely lodged in the crack of what felt like ice over a granite shelf.

“Damn.”

I thought about my options: continuing the struggle or waiting for the summer thaw. I carefully placed a boot against the floorboard and pushed.

Nothing, not even a nudge.

I lay there for a few more minutes in an attempt to gather some strength, but the fumes leaking from the gas tank were a little nauseating. I repositioned myself in an attempt to get farther away from the smell as something struck me in the face. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it burned and I swatted it away.

I looked up the thirty feet at the dead man and was rewarded with a bloody grin as he looked down at me with the knit cap pooched up at an odd angle. He flipped another match that landed farther down the embankment.

“Hey, do you mind not doing that?”

He continued to smile with one eye puckered shut and pulled another match from the small box in his hands. You would think that his motor functions would have been impaired by the shot he’d taken in the head.

The next match struck the gas tank, but I slapped it out with my glove. “Hey!”

I pulled the. 45 out and held it so that he could see it. “You remember this?”

He lay there, staring at me, and it was time to put up or shut up. I lodged my foot against the floorboard and grabbed the nearest side of the handlebars with one hand, the fumes from the gas starting to take the hair from my nose.

I gave it all I had.

Nothing.

My head dropped back in frustration, and I clamped my teeth as another match struck the machine and ricocheted off into the snow with a brief, adderlike hiss.

I aimed the. 45 at him. He was smiling again, blood staining his lips, and he ducked a little. “Stop it. Now.”

He tipped the tiny box of matches up and shook it, then slid the cover open further and tried to look inside.

He was out of matches.

I had to laugh, but when I looked back at him, he was trying to climb over the crest of the hill toward me. Not so funny. I looked at the Sig about halfway down. If he got his legs over the edge, he could just slide to his pistol.

I carefully aimed at his extended right hand. “This is the last time I’m going to warn you. Stop.”

He didn’t, and I fired. I didn’t hit his hand but it must’ve been very close, because he yanked it back and looked at me. He wasn’t smiling now, and when he lunged this time, I took careful aim.

I don’t know how long I lay there before thinking of Saizarbitoria’s cell phone in my inside pocket. I pulled it out and looked at it, anything to keep from looking at the dead man who was staring at me, his legs still invisible over the crest of the ridge; definitely Fingers Moser.

I concentrated on getting the cell phone up and operating, pulling it from the Ziploc and turning it around and flipping it open. The phone immediately displayed a splash of green and then the photo of Marie and Antonio. I stared at the display and watched as two words marched across their smiling faces-NO SERVICE.

I slumped back in my new spot, a little away from the dripping gas leak.

Turning the mobile off, I stuffed it back in the plastic bag and sealed it, carefully sliding it into the inside pocket of my jacket. “I can’t even talk to Hector.”

I lay there feeling sorry for myself and then got up on one elbow to reach behind me and see how much of the spilled supplies I could find. The first thing I located was a Snickers bar. I broke it in half and stuck part of it in my mouth-it tasted like a piece of moldy firewood and was like chewing bark. I lay there allowing my saliva to soften it a little, then chewed some more and swallowed.

Figuring there might come a time when I’d want it, I poked the other half into my pocket, flailed my hand around behind me, and finally found something else-the paperback of Dante’s Inferno.

Great, some uplifting literature to help bolster my mood.

I dropped the paperback on my chest and started thinking about my immediate future. The weather was certainly a problem. There had been a brief break in the squall, but to the northwest I could see the broiling bank of storm clouds that was coming next. Pretty soon it was going to start snowing again, and then the wind would pick up and fill my little wallow, effectively turning me into a sheriff Popsicle.

I thought about the hungry cougar back at the lodge and wondered what else there was up here that might be waiting for the opportunity of an easy meal. There are wolves in the Bighorns to go along with the mountain lions and black bears; the Game and Fish said there weren’t any grizzlies in the range, but I knew a few old-timers who called bullshit on that one. I wasn’t anxious to be the bait staked out to discover if it was true or not.

I was pretty sure that the warmth of the partial sun, my body heat, and the engine would thaw the ice shelf underneath me enough that I could dislodge my leg. I just had to find some way of passing the time.

I stared at the book on my chest.

I was going to have to get pretty desperate to start in on that.

Cord never shot an arrow from itself

That sped away athwart the air so swift,

As I beheld a very little boat

Come o’er the water tow’rds us at that moment

Under the guidance of a single pilot

Who shouted, “Now art thou arrived, fell soul?”

“Phlegyas, Phlegyas, thou criest out in vain

For this once,” said my Lord; “thou shalt not have us

Longer than in the passing of the slough.”

As he who listens to some great deceit

That has been done to him, and then resents it,

Such became Phlegyas, in his gathered wrath.

My Guide descended down into the boat,

And then he made me enter after him,

And only when I entered seemed it laden.

I thought about the first time I’d read the epic poem in the old Carnegie library that was now my office. I’d had a draconic English teacher, Betty Dobbs, who had drilled us to the point that I’d had to go to the Durant Library to discover new ways of deciphering the text.

They used to keep a fire burning in the small, marble fireplace in the winter months, and there was a long oak research table that you could sprawl your books onto. The copy they had was a beautiful old tome, the Reverend Henry Francis Cary translation with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The thing had a weight to its presentation that had you believing that you were truly glimpsing hell in a handbasket rather than the moonings of a banished, heartbroken Florentine.

Contrary to popular belief, there aren’t that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.

A depressing thought, to say the least.

I had gotten to the eighth canto and was amazed at how much history and politics there was in the thing, observations that most certainly passed me by when I was sixteen.

I marked my place by dog-earring a page and placed the book back on my chest. My eyes were tired, I had a headache, and it had begun to snow again. I’d had an eye operation a few months back that had been an unqualified success, so I was pretty sure my headache was from the bump on my forehead and the gasoline fumes and not from my eye.

I pulled the cell phone from my pocket, took it out of the bag, held it up, and looked at the two words. I turned it off, dropped the thing in the Ziploc and back in my pocket, and pulled my glove back on.

The clouds were so low, it felt like I could reach out and touch them, so I tried-my black gloves looking even darker as they rose up to the steel afternoon sky. It was getting colder, and my hopes for thawing out enough space for my leg were taking a hit. I drew my other leg under the four-wheeler and tucked the book away.

I was about to pull my hat over my face and take a little nap when I saw the horn button on the handlebars of the Arctic Cat. It was a feeble hope, but a hope nonetheless.

I pushed the button with my thumb and listened to the extended and herniated beep of the horn. I waited a moment and then tried it again, this time bleating out three shorts-three longs-three shorts. I continued the SOS pattern until I noticed a difference in the tone, indicating I was killing the battery.

I pulled up the balaclava, went ahead and put my hat over my face, tucked my arms into my body, and rolled to my left in an attempt to get as much cover from the machine as possible.

Definitely a noise.

I’d been lying there half-asleep in my little snow cocoon when I thought I’d heard something, and this was the third time I’d heard it-a snuffling, huffing noise from up on the ridge.

The wind was now howling through the swaying trees, and I was loath to poke my head out, but I was damned if I was going to be eaten and not know what it was that was eating me. Brushing away the inch of snow that had fallen, I pushed my hat off and peeled back my goggles. It was brighter, but other than that everything looked the same.

The dead convict had been partly covered over by the falling, blowing snow, but up on the ridge the wind was stronger, so it was an uneven mantle. I glanced up and down the hillside, but there was nothing else there.

I was just about to put my hat back over my eyes when I heard the snuffling and what might’ve been a grunt or growl. I reached down for the Colt and kept a weather eye on the ridge.

It was then that the dead man disappeared.

I blinked to make sure I’d seen what I’d seen, and I had. One moment the man’s corpse had been there hanging over the hillside with only the bottoms of his legs hidden, and the next, something had yanked him by them, and he was gone.

Moser had to be at least two hundred pounds. No wolf could’ve done that, and I doubt a mountain lion could’ve either.

Bear.

Had to be a bear; no other animal up here had the power to grab a full-grown man by the legs and simply snatch him away into the air.

I did some pretty damn fast calculations about hibernation and the feeding habits of bears, both black and grizzly. It was May, and the bruisers had had ample time to get up and look for something to eat. They were known to eat their fill and then bury the rest in a shallow grave for later-another comforting thought. I figured the convict meal, the prevalent fumes of gas, and the proximity of the machine might save me an eventual confrontation, but I could also be wrong.

I pulled the. 45 from my holster and brought it up aimed in the direction of the shuffling, huffing, and breathing. I half expected to hear the sounds of flesh rendering and bone crushing, but it grew silent again.

I kept the pistol pointed toward the ridge, my eyes drawn to the left by the whistling flakes. Something moved to the right, precisely where the convict had vanished. It was only a shadow, but it was a very large one, much larger than any man and much larger than any black bear.

The massive head was incredibly wide, and I could just make out the pointed ears on top and the huge hump at its back. It turned in my direction, and it was then that I saw the muzzle of the gigantic beast sniffing. I listened to its lungs tasting the air for me.

With his skull three-quarters of an inch thick, it was doubtful that I’d do any real damage to the monster, but at least it might dissuade him.

Slowly the big, ursine head swiveled until it was looking directly at me, and it was then that I fired. I saw a chunk blow off the side of its head and take part of an ear with it, and the big beast disappeared almost instantaneously.

There was no howling, no growling, nothing.

I lay there with my aim still on the ridge and hoped that the monster had decided to go with the buffet and was dragging the dead man off to a comfortable dining spot. I still couldn’t hear anything but the wind, so I waited.

I was unsure how long I lasted with my arm like that, but then it kind of dropped of its own accord. I listened to myself breathe, but over the wind I couldn’t hear anything other than my still-pounding heart.

I figured the bear was gone, and whether he’d taken the dead convict with him was his business. Keeping the. 45 on my chest, I lodged my hat up to block the wind and reintroduced my neck into the collar of the North Face. My eyes were trying to close, but my mind kept prodding them with a stick. It was in just one of those instances that I thought I might’ve heard something again, and my eyelids shot open.

There was nothing on the ridge, but my heart practically leapt from my chest when something moved right above me.

I fumbled with the. 45 trying to get it from my chest, but in one savage swipe a massive paw struck my hand like a baseball bat; the Colt fired harmlessly into the air as it flew away and cracked against the ice-covered stream a good forty feet below.

I scrambled to get the hat from my face and then lurched upward trying to strike at the beast, but the weight and size of the thing was too much. I was yelling as loudly as my raw lungs could support in hopes that I might scare the monster away, but it just stayed there.

I howled for a while and continued my doomed struggle until I noticed the creature was attempting to do something other than tear me apart. I froze as its massive paws dug underneath the machine and, in an incredible show of strength, actually lifted the gigantic four-wheeler off of me. The roar that came from the bear was enough to rattle my own lungs, and it flipped the Arctic Cat down the hill where it rolled once and then landed upright on the ice below.

I didn’t move, and the furry head with one ear hanging comically from its side looked at me. All I could think of was Lucian Connally’s adage, “They can kill us, hell, they can eat us-but we don’t have to taste good.”

I stared up at the shaggy head that seemed as wide as the trunk of my body. Astonishingly, it spoke. “What’chu doin’ this high, Lawman?”

Virgil.