2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Beckett
Evan found me in the cold room before dawn, which meant it was bad, or he thought it was.
"Tracks," he said. "Up by the old ranger station. Somebody's been living there."
I didn't stop counting. Forty-one jars of last fall's tomatoes left on the shelf, down from sixty, and it wasn't even January. I marked the number on the slate by the door and set the chalk down before I turned around.
"How long?"
"Don't know. Weeks, maybe. There's a smoke trail most mornings. Faint. Whoever it is knows to keep the fire small." He shifted his weight, and his boots were wet, which meant he'd already been out in it. The kid never slept. "I didn't get close. You said get close to nothing."
"Good." I meant it. Evan was nineteen and still alive because he listened, which made him rarer than the tomatoes. "Sit down. Eat something before you fall down."
He didn't sit. "You want me to take a couple guys up there?"
"No."
That got me a look. Down here forty feet under the mountain, in the gray light of the one bulb we let burn overnight, the look was mostly shadow, but I knew it anyway.
He thought I was being careless. He thought a smoke trail two ridges over was the kind of thing you sent men to handle and didn't handle yourself.
He was usually right about things. He was wrong about this, and I couldn't have told him why.
A lone fire that stayed small. Somebody up there who knew that a big flame was a flag and a quiet one was camouflage, who lasted weeks in a building that wasn't built to last a winter, alone, in the kind of cold that killed careless people in their sleep.
That wasn't a raider. Raiders ran in packs and burned bright because they weren't afraid of being seen—being seen was the point.
This was somebody hiding. Somebody good at it.
I wanted to know what good-at-it looked like before I sent anyone with a gun to go meet it.
"I'll go," I said.
It took most of the morning to get up there on foot, and I went alone, which Evan hated and didn't say so, because he learned that too.
The cold had teeth that day. Clear for once, the sky a thin scraped blue, and that was worse than gray.
Clear meant the warmth bled straight up off the snow into nothing, and by the time I climbed the second ridge my lungs burned with every breath and the hair in my nose froze stiff.
I kept to the treeline. Kept my rifle slung but my hand near it.
Forty years old, and my knees called out every one of those years on the downslopes, but I learned the mountain the way you learn a language, and I read it as I climbed.
Old deer crossing. A snare line, well-set, the kind a careful person checks twice a day. Empty. All of them empty.
Whoever lived up here was starving. That was plain a quarter mile out.
I smelled the station before I saw it. Woodsmoke, and under it the sour thread of a place where someone was boiling the same pot too many times, stretching nothing into less.
I came at it from above and from the side, slow, stopping every few steps to listen.
The building hunched against the slope with its paint gone and one window blacked out with a blanket.
A bucket by the door, frozen. A wood pile, small.
Too small. Whoever was here has been burning green wood and wet wood and probably furniture, anything, just to get to spring.
They weren't going to get to spring. I knew it looking at the woodpile the way I knew it about the tomatoes. The math was the math.
I should have turned around. I'd seen what I came to see—one desperate soul, half-starved, no threat to anybody but themselves. File it, leave it, let the mountain do what the mountain did. I had eighty people under that resort who needed me thinking about their winter, not some stranger's.
I didn't turn around.
I told myself I wanted to confirm the count. One person, not two. I told myself a lot of things, standing in the trees below that sad little building, and every one of them was a reason to take one more step instead of going home.
So I took it.
The snow gave me up.
I knew it the second my boot broke through the crust, that flat loud crunch that carried in still air like a slap.
Five years of moving quietly and I put my foot wrong like a kid, because I'd been looking at the woodpile and thinking about a stranger's death instead of my own.
I froze. Stupid. Freezing after the noise was worse than the noise.
Inside the station, the faint glow at the blanket's edge went out.
That told me everything. A scared person fumbles. A careless one freezes in the open. This one killed the light before I finished hearing my own mistake—fast, certain, no wasted motion. My pulse kicked up, and not all of it was because of the cold.
I had maybe a second to decide. Call out and announce myself, give a frightened, armed, cornered survivor a target with a voice. Or move.
I moved. Sideways, off the line where the light had been, behind the fat trunk of a lodgepole pine, and I barely got my shoulder to the bark when the door cracked open, not all the way, just a black sliver, and a rifle barrel came through it steady as a fence post.
Not shaking. That was the thing I would remember later. The barrel didn't shake at all.
"I can see you," a voice said. Low. Rough at the edges, pitched down hard, the way a man pitches his voice.
Except, it wasn't a man's voice, and I caught the work it took to make it one, the deliberate flattening underneath.
"Behind the pine. You take one step closer to this door and I put a hole in you, and I don't miss at thirty feet, so don't make me prove it. "
"I'm not stepping closer," I said.
A pause. The barrel didn't move. "You alone?"
"Yes."
"Liar."
"I'm alone." I kept my hands where the gap in the door could see them, out from my body, empty. "Came up to see who was burning fires on my mountain. That's all. I've seen. I'll go."
"Your mountain." Something in the voice sharpened, and I understood I said the wrong thing, given away that I was somebody, that there was a we and a somewhere behind me worth defending.
The barrel steadied another degree, if that was possible.
"Walk back the way you came. Slow. I'll be watching the trees till dark, and if I see you again I won't talk first."
Smart. That was the word that kept landing on this whole encounter, every choice this person made was the right one.
Kill the light. Stay behind the door. Don't step into the open to make threats, make them through a six-inch gap where no return shot could find you.
Assume the lie. Send the threat away without ever once giving it a clean look at the face behind the rifle.
I kept people alive for five years and I wasn't sure I would have played it cleaner.
"There's weather coming," I said, because I'm a fool. "Three days out, maybe four. The kind that takes roofs off. That building won't hold it."
"My building's none of your business."
"No," I agreed. "It's not."
I started walking. Backward at first, then sideways, never quite turning my spine to that door, down through my own betraying tracks toward the treeline.
The rifle followed me the whole way. I felt it between my shoulder blades like a thumb pressed to my spine, all the way down until the slope took me out of sight.
Halfway back to The Hollow I caught myself doing something I haven’t done in years.
I was smiling.
Annoyed. God, I was annoyed, at the wasted day, at the betraying snow, at the part of me that walked toward that station when every reasonable thing in me said walk away.
At myself, mostly, for already knowing I would go back.
The weather was real. The roof wouldn't hold.
And some idiot lever in my chest decided that the most stubborn, half-starved, sharp-tongued survivor on this mountain wasn't going to freeze to death two ridges from my door while I had jars of tomatoes to spare.
She pointed a rifle at my heart and called me a liar to my face.
I didn't even know yet that she was a she—not for certain, only that flattened voice and the work under it. But I knew the rest. I knew she would be there when I came back, because people that stubborn didn't go anywhere, and I knew she would point that rifle at me again.
I spent the whole climb down telling myself I wasn't going back.
I started loading the pack that night.