Chapter 33 #2
Bram’s arms flailed, his poles flinging wide and awkward, still looped around his wrists, hands tearing at Pike’s forearm, pounding it uselessly.
Zach couldn’t see either man’s face, only the scramble of Bram’s legs, the swing of his arms and poles.
Bram paused, found his footing, and flung himself backward, his greater height working to his advantage.
Off balance, Pike stumbled, releasing his chokehold on Bram, and together they fell, ski poles whipping out stiff from wrists and arms wheeling.
Their ski tips shot toward the heavens before landing tangled, still attached to feet.
A wordless roar traveled uphill toward Zach.
The clumsiness, the splay of the men’s skis as they fell, the way Zach couldn’t quite see their faces or hear their words at this distance, the powder shooting up around them like a puff of smoke, all gave the assault, the fall to the ground, a kind of cartoonish unreality.
Pike’s huge arm rose from the snow to try to wrap around Bram’s neck again.
But Pike must not have been able to see well from where he lay in the powder underneath Bram, because he couldn’t seem to differentiate neck from joint from waist, and as he ineffectively tried to find purchase, Bram, frenzied, managed to roll off and away, kicking hard to free his skis from where they were crossed with Pike’s.
On his stomach beside his attacker, Bram pushed up to arms and knees, back rounding and falling as he inhaled huge breaths.
Had Pike damaged his windpipe, crushed his throat?
Pike was a knot of thrashing limbs, the rest of him invisible to Zach in the snow.
Bram, hampered by his skis in his attempts at a hands-and-knees scramble to put more distance between him and Pike, twisted stiffly and pawed at his bindings until he was able to release them. He crawled away from Pike on all fours.
It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be happening.
Pike sat up then, covered in packed snow that fell away in pieces, one ski still stuck vertically in the snow, and Zach was reminded of how Pike had been buried, the way he’d been coated white then, too.
Both men were yelling, but their words were made indistinct by their fury, by the distance they traveled to reach Zach. Bram hadn’t stopped moving, and his arms swept in circles through the snow as though he was searching for something.
Pike managed to reach his ski, release it, and it fell. He leaned over his other leg, frantically digging with his hands, presumably to reach his other boot where it was buried so that he could escape the ski binding, ensure he wasn’t trapped there at Bram’s mercy.
Bram staggered to his feet some ten feet away from Pike.
Then turned and tipped his head at Pike, assessing the situation.
The angle of Bram’s head as seen from Zach’s remove made his father look like a curious child.
Despite this, despite being unable to see his father’s expression, Zach was sure Bram’s face showed a furious resolve, the vengeful grimace of the wronged Underself.
Bram moved toward Pike now, feet plunging deep without skis to hold him atop the snow, each step requiring him to pull one leg from it, then the other, and after three repetitions of this Bram unceremoniously belly flopped onto the snow and began crawling again, fast and animallike, able to move more efficiently with his weight distributed widely.
When he was within reach of the scattered, thrashing Pike, Bram raised onto his knees.
Circled his arm back, up, then forward in a way that reminded Zach of a baseball pitcher’s arcing rotation, the similarity growing all the stronger and stranger when he realized that his father was clutching an object in his hand.
At the apex of that motion there was a quiver, the thinnest of hitches, before Bram’s arm continued down, down, down toward Pike, and the thing in his father’s hand connected with Pike’s face.
A thin howl reached Zach uphill before Pike’s arm rounded out at Bram, fist connecting with cheekbone. Bram fell backward, and Pike sideways.
A wild upkick of snow as both men scrambled, Pike’s ski removed at some point without Zach realizing. The men faced each other, heavy breaths creating a wraith of white mist between them, and Zach had no fear of them noticing him at all, not now when they were only able to see each other.
As if obeying some unspoken command, they fell upon each other, trying to land punches while unstable in the snow, swatting, ski poles still dangling from Pike’s wrists to catch and interrupt his movements.
They toppled, flailed, sprang up again, swung wide.
Their helmets crashed together with a dim thud.
Zach watched, confused, disoriented, the entire scene too darkly ridiculous to be real, the violence so awkward, so unpracticed, so utterly different from anything he could have expected.
In the chaos, his father’s gloves had vanished and Pike’s helmet had gone off-kilter. Bram knocked the helmet from Pike’s head with the butt of his bare hand, Pike’s goggles flying away with it.
For a moment the blood trickling down bright red from Pike’s cheek in the midst of an all-gray world was the only thing Zach could see.
This time Bram showed no hesitation as his right arm flew through the air and down, striking the top of Pike’s skull.
From where Zach stood the vicious impact of the round, gray object Bram held in a bare hand was silent, and Zach only heard it as the hard grit of his own teeth as he reacted to his father hitting Pike’s skull again, and again, and—
Pike flung out his arms and wrapped them around Bram’s waist in a desperate, suffocating hug, both of them stumbling, tripping on the snow, their knees going soft, and then they fell together out of sight off the trail’s edge and down the wooded slope that Zach thought had been too steep to descend to go around the avalanche path.
Zach couldn’t make himself move. He felt separate from things, as if he’d watched a poorly staged play.
But the unreality of it all was punctured by the awful spray of red left behind on the snow. By the object Bram had held, which Zach was pretty sure was what he now stared at, laying like a dark smear on the spot where the men had fought.
Was it a rock?
At that moment an arm clawed over the trail’s edge. Then another. His father’s face reared up. His eyes met Zach’s across the distance. And all at once, Zach was part of things again.
Bram, blank-faced, lifted his hand in a wave.