CHAPTER 10 #3
“Line shack.” He'd already turned Gunsmoke, already seen it — the low dark shape tucked into the fold of rock near the headwater, the old line camp with its tin roof, half a quarter-mile back up the bench instead of down. “We'll never make the trucks. We make the shack.”
“We make the shack,” she agreed, and swung up.
They ran the horses.
It came faster than even she'd called it.
The first fat drops hit while they were still two hundred yards out, cold as the creek, stinging where they struck.
Then the wind flattened the grass and the light went strange and green-dark, and the lightning came off the rim close enough that the thunder didn't follow it so much as arrive with it, a single white crack and slam that she felt in her teeth and the soles of her feet, and the air for one instant tasted of cold metal and stone — that same mineral cold she'd had on her tongue at the headwater, only this time it was the storm in her mouth, the whole charged weight of the mountain about to break, and she understood with her body what she'd understood all day with her head: there was no outrunning this.
You went through it or you stood in it and let it have you.
The sorrel mare spooked sideways at the second strike, nearly unseating her. Gunsmoke crow-hopped and Beck rode it down, got a hand out, steadied her mare by the cheekpiece without being asked, and they came the last hundred yards together knee to knee through rain gone suddenly to a roar.
The lean-to clung to the shack's north wall.
They got the horses under it half by force, Beck hauling the saddles, Laney working the latch on the old door with rain running cold down the back of her neck and into her collar and her braid coming loose in copper strings across her face.
The door gave. They got the gear inside.
Beck threw his shoulder to the door and shut the storm out behind them, and the latch fell, and the roar of the rain dropped to a hammering on the tin overhead.
For a moment neither of them moved. They stood dripping in the sudden dimness, both of them breathing hard, the small dark room loud with the storm and louder with everything they weren't saying.
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The shack was one room and barely that. A sagging bunk frame with a bare ticking mattress rolled at the foot.
A cast stove gone red with rust. A rough plank table, two stools, a shelf with a tin of long-dead matches and a coffeepot furred with dust. A single window the size of a dinner plate, streaming now, the world beyond it gone to grey water.
It smelled of cold ash and mouse and old wood and the green wet of the storm pushing in under the door.
Laney stood in the middle of it, steadied her breathing, and forced her attention onto the facts.
The facts were these. The cell wasn't passing; she could hear that in the steady weight of it on the roof, no break in the rhythm, the kind of soaker that set in for hours when it came off the rim like this.
The switchbacks would already be running mud, the kind of greasy clay footing that broke a good horse's leg and a careless rider's neck, and it would be full dark inside the hour with no moon to come and the trail erased.
She crossed to the little window and looked out and down, where the trail off the bench should have shown as a paler line through the grass, and saw nothing but rain — the whole way down gone under it, the valley below swallowed, the world narrowed to this tin roof and this one streaming pane and the man wringing rainwater out of his hat behind her.
She put her hand flat against the cold glass. Her pulse was up again. She told herself it was the cold. She knew it wasn't only the cold.
Assess, she thought. Rule out. Act. There was no acting on this one.
There was no instrument in her kit for it, no protocol, no clean dry line of treatment from symptom to cure.
There was only the fact, plain as a tacky gum or a temperature spiking, and her body had already diagnosed it before her mind would say the words: no getting back tonight.
The trail home was gone, dissolving even as she watched, the rain burying the way down inch by inch.
There was only this room, and the long night in it, and ten years standing between her and the only other person in it like a third body in a space built for one.
Behind her, very quietly, Beck said her name once. Just that. Laney. The way he'd always said it, low, like it was a whole sentence, like it was the only word he had.
She didn't turn around. She watched the rain bury the trail and she went still — stiller than the cold, stiller than the storm, still all the way down to the floor of herself, the way she only ever got when something was about to cost her more than she had — and she understood that this was the one hard thing she could not get through the way she'd gotten through every hard thing for ten years.
Not alone, not tonight, not with the door latched and the trail dissolved and no other shoulder of the world to put her back against.
There was only through it. And he was here for all of it.