Snowed in with the Mountain Man (Touch Her and Die #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Wren

The map is wrong, or the mountain is. I keep telling myself it's the map.

I've been driving the same eleven miles of forest service road for two hours, and the only thing that's changed is the light.

It was bruised gray when I left the trailhead.

Now it's the color of an old nickel, and the first flakes are coming sideways across the windshield, fat and certain, the kind that mean business.

The kind my advisor warned me about in his email three days ago: First storm of the season is going to be a real one, Utley.

Get your samples and get down before Thursday.

It's Thursday.

My truck is a dented Forest Service loaner with a heater that works only when it feels insulted, and it grinds up another switchback like it resents me personally.

I've got a tray of basalt cores in the back, a notebook full of measurements, and exactly enough fieldwork left to finish the chapter on glacial striations that's been mocking me since October.

Twenty-four years old, and I have arranged my entire life around rocks.

My mother thinks this is a phase. My mother has thought everything is a phase since I was eleven, including, presumably, me.

The road forks. The map says left. My gut says right, because left climbs and the snow is already collecting in the ruts up there like flour in a sifter. I split the difference and take left anyway, because I am, my advisor likes to say, congenitally incapable of leaving well enough alone.

That's how I end up on the wrong road.

I know it's wrong within a mile, because the road stops pretending to be a road.

The grade pitches up. The aspens give way to a black wall of spruce, and then to a clearing I don't recognize from any survey map.

A flat scab of bare ground with the broken bones of old mining works rising out of it.

A headframe, gray and skeletal. A tailings pile the color of rust. A mine adit, boarded once and then unboarded by time, a black mouth in the hillside breathing cold.

And two men.

I see them before I understand them. That's the thing nobody tells you about the worst moment of your life.

It arrives in pieces, and your brain assembles it slow, like it doesn't want to.

There's a truck, a big diesel thing, backed up to the adit.

There's a tarp. There are two men, one tall and one wider, dragging the tarp toward the dark, and the tarp is heavy in a way that tarps full of nothing are not.

It catches on a rock. It rolls. And a hand falls out of it.

A man's hand, gray, the fingers curled like he died reaching for something.

I have time to think: that's a person.

I have time to think: I should not be seeing this.

Then the wider one looks up, straight through my windshield, straight into me, and the whole world goes very loud and very quiet at once.

I don't decide to run. My foot decides. The truck lurches and stalls, of course it stalls, and I crank the key while the wider man starts toward me.

Not running, which is worse. Just walking with the patient certainty of a man who has done this before and intends to do it again.

The engine catches. I throw it into reverse, my hands shaking so hard the wheel chatters under them, and I back down that god-awful grade faster than is survivable.

Gravel spits. The rear end fishtails over ice I can't see.

In the mirror, the tall one is on the phone.

That detail lodges in me like a splinter. He's not chasing. He's reporting. Which means there are more of them than two, and now there's a number being passed down the mountain, and the number is me.

I get the truck turned at the fork by some miracle of muscle and panic, and then I'm flying down the wrong road I never should have taken, and the snow is no longer flirting.

It's a sheet now, a moving wall, headlights bouncing off it so all I can see is white and the suggestion of trees.

My phone has no bars. It hasn't had bars since noon.

I'm screaming down a mountain in a whiteout with a dead man behind me and no one in the world who knows where I am.

The switchback comes out of the storm the way a wall comes out of fog, all at once, too late to argue with.

I know it's there. I drove up it. But knowing and reacting are different countries, and the ice between them is six inches deep.

I touch the brake. That's my mistake. You're not supposed to touch the brake.

Some far-off, calm part of me, the part that reads avalanche reports for fun, recites it even as I do it: don't brake on ice, steer into it, ease off?—

The back end comes around like it's been waiting all its life for this.

The guardrail is a suggestion here, a single rusted cable, and the truck takes it like thread.

Then there's no road. There's the sick, swooping weightlessness of going over, the world tilting, my own voice climbing into a register I've never heard out of it, and the windshield filling with the tops of trees that are, impossibly, below me.

The first impact folds the hood like paper.

The second throws me against the belt so hard the air leaves my body.

After that it's just noise. Snow. The long grinding scream of metal finding every rock on the way down.

Somewhere in it I think, absurdly, of the cores in the back, my beautiful basalt, and then I think of nothing at all.

When the world comes back, it comes back upside down.

I'm hanging in the belt. There's blood in my mouth and snow on my face, actual snow, inside, because the windshield is gone and the storm is coming in to inspect the wreckage.

The truck is on its roof, wedged against something, ticking.

One headlight still burns, pointed up into the falling white, a little cone of light with nothing in it but weather.

I'm alive. I take inventory the way I'd log a sample. Head, ringing but attached. Ribs, screaming. Right leg pinned under the crushed dash. Left hand free. I reach for the belt buckle and my fingers won't close.

Above me, up the slope I just fell down, there's a light that isn't mine. It bobs. It comes lower. A flashlight, swinging through the trees, and for one bright second I think rescue before the cold logic of it lands.

No one rescues you eleven miles up the wrong road in a whiteout twenty minutes after you watched them feed a body to a mine.

The light comes closer. I hear boots in snow, unhurried.

I do the only thing left to me. I kill the headlight, and I hold my breath, and I hang there in the dark in a ruined truck, praying to every rock I've ever loved that the man coming down the mountain is not the one I think he is.