Aaron Elkins: Icy Clutches

The contact station was just a few steps farther along the shore. He flicked the beam of his flashlight at the shack, confirming that he had indeed left the side window open, and hopped up onto the wooden porch in front, searching for the key. The floor creaked beneath him. Inside there was a faint, answering creak. He found the key in the first pocket he looked in and turned it in the lock, then paused. An answering creak? Had an animal gotten in? Or maybe not an animal at all? The skin on the back of his neck prickled. He turned on the flashlight and shone it through the front window, playing the beam over the floor and the sparse furniture. Nothing. He went around to the side and aimed it through the open window. Everything was perfectly still. The beam lit up the clavicle and femur on the counter, just where he'd left them.

Well, of course. What had he been expecting? What would anyone want with them? There was nothing of forensic importance in them, no information that anyone had any conceivable reason to fear. The danger was animals, not people, and there weren't any animals in there. He let out his breath and went back to the front to open the door, feeling a little ridiculous. But also a little jumpy. He reached prudently inside to turn on the lights with his left hand, the right hand holding the flashlight.

He never got to the switch. The half-open door was driven against him with nerve-jarring force, the force of a human body flinging itself onto it. Fortunately he took the brunt of the blow on his shoulder, but still the edge of the door slammed his forearm against the jamb, sending a tooth-rattling jolt of pain from fingertips to jaw. He stumbled backwards onto the porch, the flashlight dropping to the floor inside the room and blinking out.

He doubled over, sucking in his breath, eyes streaming, cradling his arm against his chest. His hand was numb, as heavy as concrete. Not broken, the rational gray matter of his cerebral cortex was smoothly assuring him. Merely a sharp blow taken directly on the “funny bone,” that exquisitely sensitive spot where the ulnar nerve lies directly on the bony medial epicondyle of the humerus just below the skin. Discomfort acute but short-lived. Not to worry.

Merely, hell! the primitive, raging brain stem structures of his limbic system shrieked back. That sonofabitch on the other side of the door just tried to break your fucking arm! Go get that mother!

I think we'd just better think this through, don't you? his cortex sneered predictably. That person on the other side of that door may well be armed. Wouldn't it make more sense to For once Gideon went with his brain stem. Snarling half in pain and half in anger, pressing his arm to his side, he threw himself in a flying kick at the door, which was slightly open and still shuddering with the force of the impact against his arm.

Unfortunately, the sonofabitch on the other side of the door wasn't there. In the second or so that it had taken Gideon to react, he or she had stepped to the side. The door sprang unresistingly open to bang against the wall, and Gideon came flying through. His foot came down on the flashlight barrel, which spurted out from under his sole and sent him careening the length of the room until he was brought up short by the counter, the edge of which caught him painfully below the rib cage on the left side.

Meanwhile the door had rebounded to clatter shut again. The room was completely dark, utterly, startlingly silent after all the noisy door-banging and galumphing over the wooden floor. Whoever had slammed the door on him was still in the room; there had been no time for anyone to slip out. Who's there? almost sprang from Gideon's lips. Where are you? But he held back. Whoever it was couldn't see any better than he could. Why broadcast where he was? Quietly, he shifted his body away from the counter and turned back to face the area near the door, balancing his weight evenly over his feet, getting ready for whatever came next.

As usual, his cerebral cortex had been correct; the searing pain in his arm had been short-lived. Already it was becoming a buzzing, bearable tingle. He breathed quietly, shallowly, through his mouth, standing perfectly still, a little crouched, his hands away from his sides. Let the other person make the first move, the first sound.

The first sound was a soft click, followed by a burst of light; dazzling, pulsing, blinding concentric rings of white. Whoever it was had a flashlight of his own, a powerful one, and was beaming it into his face from a couple of yards away, fluttering it to keep him blinded. The floor creaked as the other person moved forward. Gideon narrowed his eyes to a squint and strained to see between his out-thrust fingers, but the brilliant, darting light seemed to fill his eyeballs, his skull. He could see only his own backlit hands and wrists, raised as if in supplication, exposed and vulnerable. There was another creak. The wobbling, blazing circles moved closer, full of menace. Was there a gun, a knife, a club in the other hand?

Gideon's cerebral cortex had no pertinent advice for him. He did the only thing he could think of, which was to launch himself at the light, or rather just below it, arms spread, hoping to get them around a body. But the person holding it was a step ahead of him. The flashlight was apparently being held well off to the side. Gideon's forearm brushed against what felt like a hip, but his arms dosed around nothing, and he fell heavily to the floor, immediately going into a roll and scrambling toward the light again.

It went abruptly out, leaving him trying to blink away the afterimages, then came on again a foot or two to the left. Was it farther away? Closer? He lashed out at it from his knees, feeling like an animal caught in a net of illumination, unable to get at its captors. The light went out as he thrust at it, and came on almost at once, a little more to the right. Out again. On again.

An abrupt rustling sound, a sudden movement.

Out again.

Chug, chug, chug, chug. Slowly, the train slipped peacefully away into the darkness, the steady beat of the wheels lulling him into a…

Train?

Gideon opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on the floor of the contact station, a few feet from the open door, with a throbbing head and an upset stomach. Rolling his eyes gingerly upward, he could see the narrow black tops of spruce and hemlock trees framed in the doorway against the not-quite-as-black sky. He realized at once that he had been unconscious only a few seconds; the chugging noise was running footsteps on the path back to the lodge. He could still hear them, or rather the sounds of someone mounting the wooden stairs leading to the main building and the boardwalks that led to the rooms.

He knew better than to try to give chase. It was going to be a few minutes before his legs would be able to take him anywhere; before the rest of him would want to go, anywhere. He wiggled his fingers, moved his toes. His nervous system seemed to be working all right. When he became aware of a hot, wet stinging at the left corner of his chin, he touched it with a finger. It was nothing awful; a small, raw scrape coated with a thin ooze of serous fluid and maybe a little blood. That was where he'd been hit, then. Probably with the flashlight. Not over the head, but on the jaw, the way a boxer was knocked out.

That was fortunate; less likelihood of real damage this way. The mobile jaw automatically swiveled away from the force of a blow, diffusing it in a way that the more rigid cranium couldn't. All in all, he was sure he hadn't been seriously hurt. He felt no worse-no better either-than the couple of times he'd been knocked out several lifetimes ago when he was working his way through graduate school by boxing in local fight clubs. The disorientation and nausea were to be expected. And the fact that he couldn't remember the blow that had knocked him out was no cause for concern. That was normal. A transient axial distortion of the brain stem caused by a blow to the chin, which is what a knockout is, almost always resulted in retrograde amnesia that "Ah, shut up,” he mumbled half aloud. Christ, what he didn't need now was another lecture from his cerebral cortex. Grunting, he pushed himself up on one elbow and waited, eyes closed, for the queasiness to subside a little. After a minute, he got cautiously to his feet. Everything ached, not just his jaw, but that was hardly a surprise. He switched on the ceiling lights and went to the counter. No surprise there either.