1. Emilia #2
I shove my hands back into the engine bay with renewed urgency.
I reach for the split hose and squeeze it shut, pressing the rubber edges together like I can seal it through sheer force of will.
Green fluid oozes between my fingers, warm for a second before the mountain air steals the heat.
I hold it there, both hands wrapped around the rupture, and look around the engine for something, anything, duct tape or a clamp or a zip tie.
There is nothing. Of course there is nothing.
I bought this car from a stranger in a gas station parking lot. It didn't come with a toolkit.
I let go of the hose. The coolant drips once more and stops. Empty. All of it, all over the engine, all over the road, all over my hands that are now stained green and shaking worse than before.
The car is dead.
I am standing on a mountain road in the dark in a silk blouse and ruined loafers with no phone, no map, and no plan beyond the single burning imperative that has carried me this far.
Keep moving. Do not stop.
I start walking.
Every step is a negotiation between my feet and the ground.
The loafers have no tread, no grip, nothing between my soles and the ice-slicked asphalt except a thin layer of Italian leather that was designed for gallery openings and restaurant lobbies, not mountain passes in the midst of a blizzard.
I shuffle forward like an old woman, arms sliding around my torso, the moth-eaten blanket from the back seat pulled tight over my shoulders like a shawl.
It whips in the wind and I have to keep catching the edges before they rip free.
The road climbs. Of course it climbs. Everything up here climbs.
I put my head down and observe my feet and count my steps because counting gives the panic something to chew on besides my sanity.
One, two, three, four. The snow is ankle-deep in the places where it's drifted across the road, and each time I wade through a drift the cold shoots up through my calves and into my knees and settles there, a dull electric ache that makes my joints feel brittle and wrong.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. My fingers have stopped hurting.
I know what that means, too. I curl them into fists inside the blanket and squeeze, trying to force the blood back into the tips. Thirty-one, thirty-two.
I don't hear the truck at first.
The wind is doing something complicated in the trees, swirling and gusting in patterns that play tricks with sound, so when the low rumble first reaches me I think it's thunder.
Distant, rolling thunder from somewhere over the ridge.
But it doesn't fade. It builds. It becomes a grinding mechanical growl that echoes off the rock face to my left and fills the narrow pass with a vibration I can feel through my ruined shoes, up through the bones of my feet.
Headlights sweep around the curve behind me.
Not the thin, yellow headlights of a sedan.
These are massive, wide-set and mounted high, throwing a wall of white light across the road that catches the falling snow and turns it into a billion tiny stars.
The engine behind those lights sounds like something alive and angry, diesel-throated and deep, and when I spin around the glare is so bright I have to throw my arm up to shield my eyes.
A tow truck. Enormous, battered, caked in road salt and rust. It grinds to a halt twenty feet behind me with a squeal of brakes that sets my teeth on edge, the chassis rocking on its suspension as the weight settles.
The engine idles with a throaty, uneven rumble.
I can see the shape of a winch assembly on the back, chains swaying gently from the boom, and a light bar across the cab roof that paints the snowfall in alternating pulses of amber.
The driver's door opens.
The man who steps out is not a man. He is a structure.
A geological event. He drops from the cab to the road and the truck actually lifts on its springs when his weight leaves it, and when his boots hit the asphalt the impact is audible even over the wind.
He stands there in the headlight glare and he is enormous, six and a half feet of broad shoulders and heavy arms and a torso that tapers into hips still wider than most men's shoulders.
His dark hair is pushed back from his face, wild and uncombed, and his hands hang at his sides like weapons, thick-fingered and stained with something dark.
Grease. Engine grease, ground so deep into the calluses and the creases of his knuckles that it looks permanent, like it grew there.
He's wearing a canvas work jacket, unzipped despite the cold, over a thermal shirt that strains across his body.
Heavy boots. No hat. No gloves. The cold that is killing me doesn't seem to register on him at all.
He stands in the blowing snow like he was carved from the same granite as the mountain, and he looks at me, and his eyes are blue.
Not warm blue. Not sky blue. Cold blue. Cynical blue.
The blue of deep ice in places where the sun never reaches.
He does not look happy to see me.