“Who’s there?”
Silence.
I couldn’t just wait. I stuck the Beretta out and started firing, moving the gun in a circle. I quickly jutted my head up and glanced out, expecting to see Jens, maybe aiming at the door from a few feet off, but I saw Michelle Aitik. She lay still, two feet off, one hand tucked beneath her crumpled body, one stretched toward the door. She was a rag doll. Face in the snow. But the black hair spread over her back was matted with blood.
Christ, Christ, I killed the person helping me.
I made myself keep going. As I struggled out and up top I saw with no relief that I’d been wrong; she was dead, all right, but from this angle, it was clear that the wounds in her back were entry wounds. Clean and smaller, not wider. I’d not shot her. He had.
She’d probably been in the house, heard me firing, maybe heard the snowmobile start up, came out and saw Jens and he’d whirled, fired, and then he’d run for it. Then Michelle, mortally wounded, crawled a couple of feet, smearing the snow, reaching to release me, reaching for the lock on that heavy trapdoor.
My rage bloomed and for a moment drove off pain and dizziness. He’d slept with this woman. Then he’d shot her as casually as a farmer kills an animal. He’d killed four people on the tundra. He’d murdered Karen and Michelle. He’d destroyed the lives of innocent people. He’d used that storage cellar down there as a repository for a bioweapon, a murder weapon. He’d spread the disease from that vial.
I’ll kill you. Whoever you are, I will kill you.
I needed a doctor, but there was no time for that. I limped into the garage. Michelle’s snowmobile was gone. It had left a fifteen-inch-wide track heading north, up to the road, toward the sea, where Jens Erik, or whoever he really was, had driven off.
The wind was picking up, from the north, and that trail would be gone in minutes. I knew that there had been no time for General Homza to get enough soldiers out on the ice to stop the exodus from town. Not yet.
Go after him.
There was just my Ford for that and a Subaru Impreza in the garage, but both vehicles, even with studded tires, would not be able to follow a snowmobile through smaller openings in the sea ice.
If anyone in those adjacent homes was watching, they would have seen an apelike figure, me, run, hunched over, into the street, a knuckle-dragger with a Beretta, moving sideways, house to house, garage to garage. My ribs were on fire, the headache was worsening. In a subdural hematoma, one side of the brain hits the back skull, bounces off, then the other side hits the front. You’re okay at first, but things worsen if internal bleeding continues.
Don’t think about that.
Snowmobiles were often kept in yards. Sometimes, owners left keys in ignitions, not so much out of a belief in honesty, but it was tough to steal a snowmobile in a place where everyone knew one another, and many people would recognize the vehicle in town.
Why are you riding around on Gustav’s Honda?
In the third yard I passed, I spotted a red-and-white Polaris with a cracked windshield. The key was in the ignition! As I straddled the seat I saw a surprised face, a child clutching a doll, appear at the living room window. The face disappeared. It was replaced by an angry man as I turned the throttle. The snowmobile coughed clouds of blue smoke. I shot from the yard, glimpsing the front door opening and a man in jeans and a flannel shirt running out, shaking a fist.
I bumped up onto the street and felt the track catch and I turned left. Jens’s trail led straight to the sea. My back was on fire. The wind blew cross-wise, into my mouth, making it harder to breathe. The brakes were spongy. The pitted wind guard would make visibility difficult. Each bump was torture. I screamed to stay angry, screamed a war cry, screamed as fuel.
I took a shortcut between two homes and down Stevenson Street and Nachik Street and across Egasak onto the ice-sheathed beach. I spotted a moving dot a half mile ahead, zipping west. His track was shallow and the wind made it less visible with each minute. What if the person ahead isn’t him? What if I mixed up his trail with another escapee?
It better be him. I turned the throttle higher with my right thumb. I sped up.
Which was dangerous.
I left the beach and reached sea ice, but this was no flat plain, no Bonneville salt flats of ice, no smooth skating-rink-type surface where you could drive as fast as the engine allowed. This was an obstacle course; hard, ridged, pitted geography that could hide a hill or make it look like a depression. It could offer a slit of open water as looking solid, a mirage. It could topple a rider as easily as a giant flicked a fly. One second you’re speeding along. The next you slam into an outcrop, miss a dip, plunge through an opening, skid sideways and topple. The borough emergency squad regularly attended to people — newcomers usually — who’d suffered accidents on ice.
I sped up again.
So, apparently, did the figure ahead.
I maintained distance but my windshield grew smeary. The horizon merged ice and white air. Featherlike flakes began swirling. I lacked goggles. I needed a thermal snowmobile suit. My fingers were already cramping. I needed mitten liners against hypothermia. And special boots, not the walking kind which I wore. A helmet would be nice, too.
Maybe goggles are in the saddlebags but there’s no time to look. At least not until I get past any troops out here.
Wind abraded my face. At thirty miles an hour, the temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees. Night was falling. That would make it worse. My ribs seemed to be cracking, fractures inside growing longer. I was losing vision, as it contracted at the edges, but I willed it to expand. My headache spread out, deepened. Thudthudthudthud!
Pay attention.
I bounced out of an ice rubble field, reached a rise, and leaned forward on the snowmobile for traction. I remembered lessons that Alan McDougal had drilled into me at the beginning of the summer, when he gave Eddie and me a course in basics. I sat back for better weight distribution on the way down the hill.
Ahead of me the terrain went perpendicular. I shot across a hill face, leaning up, away from the drop, into the slope. Jens was a good rider. But I kept pace, riding with one knee on my running board, the other leg out, as I tried to ignore the pain.
Was I gaining on him?
That’s when I saw two other snowmobiles closing on me, ahead, a pincer closing from right and left, both machines spewing ice trails, trying to cut me off.
They were Rangers. Rangers trying to expand the blockade. Rangers on confiscated snowmobiles, drawing the cordon closed to cut off seaside escape. They had to be soldiers because civilians would have avoided other snowmobiles. These guys thought I was trying to escape.
Jens Erik had gotten through before the circle closed.
I might not make it.
I sped up, a mistake. The Polaris spun out. I’d been pushing too hard. I bounced off a stubbly rise and was suddenly spinning in a circle. I hit more ice, tilting, almost falling, sliding sideways on an incline as the track fought for grip. The other snowmobiles closed on me.
I saw one man unsling a rifle off his back as he moved.
I gunned the engine and only at the last second realized that the ice had opened here, torn, and looming twenty yards ahead lay a long, black slit of open water!
I slammed on the brakes. The sudden locking almost launched me off the seat. The track caught and spun left and I slid in a fast glide toward open water.
Jens Erik Holte, in the distance, beyond the two snowmobiles, drew farther away.
Ahead of me, the ice began bursting up in puffs, warning shots. The soldiers did not see the open water yet. They were shooting to try to stop me. They thought I could stop if I wanted. But I could not.