“Curt’s going down to the cops, remember?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t tell him about the coke.” Steve’s head popped out of the plane. “Though you were going to, you idiot.”
“They’re gonna know, soon as they look in those coffins. You can’t get all that powder out.”
“No they won’t.” Steve glanced around, spoke low as if it were a secret. “Gasoline on hot metal, eventually, guess what?”
“Fuck you, you are crazy –”
“It’s the only solution, man. That way the cops don’t know about the coke, and even the owners, if they come back, they might think it all burned … with six feet of snow on it, it’ll be hard to tell …”
“Your tracks,” Zack nodded uphill, toward the cave, “they’re visible to anyone.”
Steve pointed up. “You been watching this snow? More’s coming. Lots more. There won’t be a trace of our tracks by morning.”
“And you think you can sell it? What are you going to do, run ads in the papers?”
“Wall Street folks are always buying … And you, with all your friends in Vegas, what are you worried about? Coke is Vegas and Vegas is coke. All you have to do is ask around.”
All I have to do, Zack thought, is hike down to the highway and call the cops. But then Steve and I get arrested for trying to steal the coke, or I get accessory because I didn’t tell Curt about the coke, I lose my job, and never get back my portfolio Steve invested for me.
And the coke’s owners will know who we are and come after us.
And Haney the Rat and his Vegas guys want theirs now.
THE INSTANT he heard it Curt knew. Grizzly in the horses. He tore from his sleeping bag, grabbed his flashlight and Ruger and sprinted barefoot through the snow for the corral, the horses stamping, neighing and kicking, a deep growl.
He fired a shot in the air as he ran, hoping to scare the griz but it kept snarling like it had a horse down, killing it.
Curt leaped the corral into the mix of swirling kicking horses, the griz twenty yards away, red-eyed, jaws wide as it swung its massive head from side to side, ready to charge. Curt fired a shot past its head, worrying as he fired again that the shots would just madden it, and even if he hit it between the eyes a .357 slug would just piss it off. He fired again, just past its ear, yelling as he ran toward it, and with a strange hiss the griz turned and shambled into the night.
“YOU HEAR THAT?” Zack cupped his ear with a frozen glove. They were taking turns with the pack frame, each carrying it a few hundred yards uphill, then the other. “Maybe Curt sees we’re missing, wants us back?”
“Why?”
“Worries we’re out here, that’s all.”
“Snowing harder.” Steve held out a palmful. “Maybe he’s worried about that.”
Zack halted, pack frame on one shoulder. “Our doing this could screw Curt up, somehow.”
“No way he’ll ever know.”
“In the morning he’s going to want us all to go down.”
“All the more reason to move this stuff now.”
Zack followed him uphill. He thought of going down the mountain also, to call Monica. But it was too late now, unless she was on late shift … He imagined pretending he’d just wanted to call her to say hi and how much he missed her. Not mentioning this weird and deadly scene he had somehow stumbled into.
BY THE TIME Curt had calmed the horses and got back to his tent his bare feet were blue and numb. He pulled on socks and boots and stumbled to the fire but it was out.
He waded into the forest snatching low dead branches then remembered he’d already stacked the morning’s kindling under a tarp, went to it and shoved some into the fire pit, ran feet aching to the slit trench and grabbed toilet paper and pushed it under the kindling, tugged a box of matches from his pocket and struck one on the box.
It dragged a damp furrow in the tinder strip, snapped.
Damnation, the kicking horses had dumped snow on him, soaked his pocket. He ran back to the cook tent and snatched a lighter, lit the toilet paper but a gust knocked snow from a bough on it. He dashed back to the slit trench, grabbed more toilet paper and lit it under the sticks again but now they were wet from the fallen snow.
Damn again. He stood, took a breath, stumbling on numb feet. He was going to have bad frostbite. “Zack! Steve! Come give me a hand!”
Silence of new snow sifting down through the boughs and piling on the ground. “Where are you?”
He waded through the snow to Steve’s tent. Empty. Zack’s too.
“Steve! Zack!” His voice echoed through the hills and in its echo he recognized fear. You’re being stupid, he told himself. You could die. He ran back to the cook tent, lit the propane cooktop and put his bare numb feet on its edge.
Where were Steve and Zack, the damn fools?
Then he smelled it. Upwind. Rank, rotten meat, thick hot damp fur.
The griz was back.
He yanked on his boots, snatched the flashlight and scrambled out the cook tent grabbing at his hip holster but the Ruger was gone.
He checked his pockets, the cook tent floor.
The Ruger was truly gone.
Maybe he’d lost it in the corral, trying to quiet the horses.
Head down, ears back, with a deep grunting growl the grizzly shuffled toward him out of the forest.
THE PLANE BLEW in a tall orange ball turning the night incandescent and driving them back with its heat. Snow swirled down on it in great hissing clouds that the flames steamed and drove upwards. They watched till the coffins were cinders at the bottom of the bare black fuselage. The snow fell harder, dampening the blaze, obscuring it as they trudged away, till the plane was a glimmer on the horizon, then gone.
The blizzard wailed across the valley, erased the line between earth and sky and hid the tracks they’d made coming from camp. They could see nothing but stinging snow in their eyes, snow and ice packed to their bodies and swirling past their feet. Zack went first, probing with his boots for their old tracks under the new drifts, a gloved hand like a visor over his eyes to keep them from freezing.
Soon he could no longer find their tracks under the snow. He wandered side to side, feeling with his toes, finding nothing. The blizzard hailing down had hidden Steve; Zack yelled for him but the answer seemed to come from everywhere.
“I am not going to lose you,” Zack said aloud, crawling through the snow looking for his back tracks till there was a fudge of gray in the whiteness ahead, a blur that became Steve bent over, hiding his face from the wind. “Where the fuck were you?” he yelled.
They wandered on, in circles, lost before the beginning of time, in howling snow and deadly cold. Zack imagined them dying here, to be found in the spring, half-gnawed by animals. He thought of all the people down through time who’d died in frozen wildernesses.
He thought of his sleeping bag, the Jack Daniels in his morning coffee. Live for that.
Behind him Steve followed with the dumb obedience of the dying. One foot in front of the other, in the same holes. Easy, humans had been doing it for millions of years.
WHEN THE GRIZ kept coming Curt had grabbed a plastic tarp, twisted it round a pole, lit it on the propane cooktop and run yelling at him. Surprised, the great bear had risen up on rear legs, taller than the low trees, monstrous in the dark. Expecting to be slapped dead Curt shoved the blazing tarp against the grizzly’s chest and