The Devil's Dozen

Eighteen

I might have been one of the million boulders buried under the quiet snow. I awoke not sure I was alive. But I was merely freezing, not frozen. I could see nothing. There was a lot of snow on top of me. The only airpocket I had was what I’d made with my chest, arms, and knees when I’d curled up. That was Jaime’s doing, the fact that I had air and was alive. If I’d just fallen without going into the egg position, I would have suffocated, lost enough heat to freeze, and been ripped in four different directions. As it was, my chances weren’t so great.

Cold numbed my variety of cuts, but I was first concerned about broken bones. I tensed every muscle, waiting for that jolt of raw pain when flesh moves over shattered bone. I found plenty of bruises but no broken bones. In my cold tomb, I pulled back the sleeve on my left wrist.

It was ten in the morning according to the luminous dial of my watch, five hours since I’d been buried, five hours since AXE’s raid. I might have been in the center of the earth for all I knew what happened at Snowman. I felt along my legs. The skis were gone, the boot latches snapped cleanly off. I tried shoving myself up. The snow over me didn’t give an inch. I was sealed in tight. Sooner or later I would freeze. The air I was breathing was already poisoned with carbon dioxide. This was what it was like to be buried alive. I corrected my thought. Not like, I was buried alive.

Something was restraining my wrist. Fumbling, I felt the strap of a ski pole. Quickly, I pulled the pole towards me. It was bent, but all in one piece. If there were less than five feet of snow over me, I could make an airhole with the pole. I shoved the pole up, twisting it like a drill. It pierced the snow as far as I could reach, but the pole didn’t reach light or air. Killmaster was buried deep.

I pulled the pole back. Reaching for air was futile. I could go into a Zen trance. That would increase my life span by decreasing the amount of air I needed and the amount of protein energy I was burning up just to maintain some body temperature. The tactic would make some sense if someone was digging me out. No one was digging, though. A trance was giving up.

I shoved the pole sideways into the snow. Working used up oxygen and energy, but I’d made my choice to fight. On the fiftieth or five hundredth probe, the pole hit something solid in back and above me. I kept tapping until I felt certain what I was hitting was wood and not stone. It was a tree, ripped from its roots and brought all the way down the mountainside by the avalanche. Slowly, I started pulling the pole-loosened snow between me and the tree out of the way.

To move the five feet to the tree took ninety minutes by my watch. I pulled my gloves off and felt the bark gratefully. It was a fir with branches emerging at right angles to the trunk, a regular ladder. I was weaker and colder than earlier but now I had hope and, more important, leverage. Blindly, I burrowed my way upwards an inch at a time. The carbon dioxide began playing tricks with my mind, creating subtle, fatal hallucinations. At one point, I became certain I was digging down, not up. Deliberately, I closed my mind to thought and kept digging mechanically.

The snow seemed looser. I ignored the sign. I could make out light. That might be another hallucination. Then the snow was falling in on me. My hand groped and felt nothing but air. I was breathing again, great draughts of cold, fresh oxygen, and minutes later I broke through the surface and crawled out on top of my tomb.

The time was four in the afternoon. Moving five feet laterally and eight feet up had taken six hours. Snow was packed into the fiber of my clothes, and my skin was white with cold, but I had no complaints. After the claustrophobia of the snow tomb, I lay down and stretched my arms and legs, luxuriating in being alive. The condensation of my breath was a victory signal.

I turned over on my stomach. The valley floor was a mass of broken snow. I’d just decided to make my way back to Snowman, when I saw two dots moving towards me. They might have been searchers from AXE, but I doubted it. Whoever won the battle of Snowman would have copters. These two were traveling on snowshoes and escaping. I was sure I hadn’t been seen; if there was one thing I looked like now it was snow. I lay still and waited.

At 1,000 yards I made them out. One was King. The other was Vera. They were coming straight towards me.

He looked very tired. He had a wound on one cheek, and he kept looking back at the sky. Vera just looked tired. There was no way they’d miss me if they stayed on course. King kept his Luger in one gloved hand. I had nothing.

I crawled back to the hole I’d climbed out of. I could bury myself again. The idea nauseated me as soon as I looked down the shaft. Besides, I’d come to stop King, not hide from him. The Kings, father and daughter, were 900 yards away. I reached into the hole and pulled the tree branches up into a bower. I pushed loose snow over the branches until they were covered. My tomb had become a trap. I scuttled back, away from the hidden cave, and stayed still.

When King and Vera were fifty yards away, I stood up. They halted, shocked as if a ghost blocked their path.

“You’re dead!” King blurted out, as if to reassure himself.

“You’re dead,” I answered. “You had some visitors last night, I assume.”

He reddened and it wasn’t from cold. I had my answer.

“Kill him, father,” Vera said. “Kill him for good this time.”

King was still in shock.

“The men in the copter, they saw you die, Carter. The sensors said you were dead.”

“Just hibernating. Throw me your gun, King.”

“Kill him,” Vera shook her father. “You shoot or I will.”

King seemed to wake up, enough to see I had no weapon. He raised the Luger and sighted it on my chest. The muzzle wavered. He fired, and snow kicked up to my left. He rubbed his eyes and moved forward. Snowman was gone. His millions were gone. The Borgia was suddenly a tired old man. He halted and fired again. A bullet whistled past my ear. The day before he could have hit me running at 300 yards. The day before he wasn’t shaking.

I dropped to the snow. His aim was improving, but his reflexes were slow. His shot hit where I’d stood, not where I landed. He staggered forward clumsily on his snowshoes. I rolled back over the snow as he emptied three more bullets from the Luger’s clip.

“Give me the gun,” Vera ran after him angry and frustrated. King stood only feet away from the pit I’d prepared, when Vera caught up and made him stop. “Let me kill him.”

She grabbed his arm and he pulled away. King lurched back, fighting free of her hands. Then, with a snap of branches, he dropped through the snow surface. A geyser of snow flew up from the pit, and a gunshot went off under the snow. Vera edged to the rim of the pit, looked, and covered her face in horror.

A ghoulish, horrible scream of pain came out of her. She dropped her hands, stared at me and began running, away from me, back to Snowman.

“Vera, wait!”

I got to my feet and ran after her. Around the pit’s rim was a freckling of blood and half of her father’s head. As he’d dropped, his arm had hit a branch and he’d fired again. The last time he hadn’t missed.

“Wait, Vera,” I cried, as I tripped and fell. On my hands and knees, I felt a familiar, unnerving sensation. The ground was shaking. One whole side of the valley, the side that hadn’t fallen the night before, was spilling its wave of snow now. The first avalanche had loosened the opposite hillside. King’s gunshots were the last vibrations needed to trigger another avalanche. Tons after ton of white death was falling from the high peaks, collecting more snow, and gathering speed. I yelled, and I couldn’t hear my voice myself.

And Vera kept running toward the gathering avalanche. Hysteria gripped her face whenever she looked back at me. I ran over the trembling earth after her. Fatigue and lack of snowshoes slowed me down. The avalanche swept over the lower slopes, building force as it descended to the valley. The tree line vanished, the roots tom out by a mile-long white hand. I fell again over a jumble of ice. Vera looked back, not at me, as I’d been thinking, but over my head.

An AXE copter hovered twenty feet above me. It was the copter her father had been fearfully searching for when he kept looking back. Hawk was beside the pilot waving at me feverishly, with evident relief that I’d finally noticed them. The sound of the motors was completely lost in the fury of the avalanche.

A rope ladder dropped down to me. I jumped on, but instead of climbing, waved the pilot forward. Hawk waved me to come up. I shook my head and pointed at Vera. I couldn’t hear Hawk cursing, but I could read his lips. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder and, reluctantly, moved toward the approaching snow.

I skimmed seven feet off the ground. We gained ground fast on Vera but she had a good head-start, and when she saw me on the ladder she ran all the harder. She didn’t seem to see the avalanche at all. The white wave roared down at her. We would reach her, though, I was sure of it.

Before the snow rolled a wave of turbulent air. The copter bucked and dove. Hawk tried to wave me up again. I hung from the ladder and reached out my hand. We were almost to Vera and so was a tidal wave of snow twenty feet high and moving just as fast. Vera suddenly looked very small, a dark figure against a rolling white background. I yelled until my throat was hoarse. Under the bucking copter, the ladder jumped and twisted.

At the last moment, she seemed to see the avalanche. She froze in terror. We dipped down, rocking in the wind of the avalanche, and I reached out as far as I could. Vera stood on the shaking ground, inches from my grasp, hate warring with fear in her eyes. The snow poured down.

Her hand shot out and grasped mine. At once, the copter lifted, desperately trying to rise above the cascading snow. The avalanche hit with all its force, rising to Vera’s waist. She said something I couldn’t hear. But the hate was gone from her face and so was the fear. There was only acceptance.

Then she was gone, tom away as the trees had been torn down. The snow wave covered her. The avalanche kept moving and building, killing and covering what it killed. Just as King said it would.

Stiffly, I climbed up into the copter. From there I watched the avalanche roll to its violent end. Hawk and I couldn’t talk above the noise, which was just as well.

Finally, the avalanche was over. The valley was still, very white and, from a great height, very pretty. I opened my fist. My fingers were smeared with blood and in my palm was an antique cameo ring.

“Hers?” Hawk asked. When I nodded, he said, “You must have been holding her pretty hard.”

“I was.” I opened the false top. Inside was white powder.

“What’s that, Nick?”

I didn’t have to taste it to know.

“Her suicide if she ever needed it. Heroin. An overdose of snow.”

The copter wheeled and headed for Snowman.

“She never needed it,” Hawk said.