Nevada Barr - Winter Study

The hip belt released, and she used the last of her air to kick for the surface. Then she stopped. Fell back and down and back. The drag on her hips gone, but the pack still holding her fast to her upper arms, pulling her headfirst toward the bottom of the lake.

The light grew watery and faint. Anna watched as her feet floated up past her eyes.

The cold that had hammered into her face and neck soaked through the layers of clothing. At first, it seared her flesh, then it didn’t. Icy fingers crept up her legs, down the neck of her parka. Her feet were gone to it already, she couldn’t feel them.

One arm came free of the confining straps, the hand with the bloated mitten. Anna watched it as it drifted out from her body. Above it, the irregular half-moon shape of light was no bigger than the palm of her hand.

Oddly detached, she watched it shrink to the size of a half-dollar. A gentle bump stopped her fall. She rested on the bottom of the lake, the moon of light feeble in the liquid sky. Quiet surrounded her. Her breathing stopped, her heart starved and pounded throughout her body, a frenetic drumbeat in a deaf world. The water was so clear she could see gravel on the lake bed, a vestige of weeds as unmoving as if sculpted in stone.

Dropping arrow straight from the world above was a single line, inked black against the gray of the water. At its end, a D was written in crushed script. The foothold trap on the line of kinkless chain. She had wanted to trap a wolf with it, wanted to stroke its living fur and feel its breath. Cruel to want that, she thought. To frighten such a grand creature that she might be close to it.

Water was clearer than air; she could see each individual link in the chain she had carried so far. She marveled that an entity as fierce as the lake could be so completely still; not a ripple showed its power yet it had swallowed Anna as neatly as a trout swallowing a fly. The lake had slipped away into silence. And the water was so clear, soon, Anna believed, soon she would be able to breathe it.

The trap was an ugly thing, a reminder of the metal rampage humanity with its mines and forges and industry had loosed on the world. Anna didn’t want it to be in her eyes when she drew the lake into her lungs and took her first breath in this new world. As she mustered the energy to turn her head away, the foothold trap leapt; a quick jerk upward, then fell again, the way an angler’s bait pretended life to lure greedy fish.

Anna wondered if she was a fish yet.

The line jerked again. Lazily she reached for it, wanting to make it be still, make it part of the lake with her. Her fingers fumbled. The trap swayed away. Slowly it drifted back. She threaded her hand and wrist through it and pulled, a tiny pull, maybe not a pull at all.

The crescent of light dimmed. Her brain was shutting down. The pounding from her heart eased to a soft rush, waves breaking lazily against sandy beaches. Bands of pressure within her lungs pressed outward, attempting to break through to the air.

When she was asleep, she would breathe in the lake.

Ophelia.

HOOKS CAUGHT IN HER MERMAID MOUTH, cutting the flesh and trying to drag her from the sea. Anna tossed her head from side to side. Fishes chewed at her face; she felt the ripping but not the pain. A hammerhead shark rammed into her chest and the air blasted out of her.

And in again.

“Annnhhh. Annnh.”

Breath out and in and vomiting, her lungs caught fire, her throat burned with charred flesh.

“Annh. Annnh.”

Hot lead spewed from her scalding her tongue, blistering her lips.

“Annhh. Anhhh.”

The noise maddened her, and she knew she was crying as she descended to hell in fire and ice. Her eyes would not open, as in dreams of blindness they had been sewn shut. Screaming, she forced her lids wide.

She was out. She was on her side, one arm stretched over her head. Her right eyeball was so close to the ice, she could see crystals moving by in fits and starts. The endless embrace of the lake was being scraped off. A machine gun battered through her head. Her teeth were chattering.

“Annnh.”

Anna had not made that sound. Fish did not speak. Fish got fried over hot coals. She was looking forward to that.

“I’ve landed four-hundred-pound marlin that were easier to reel in than you.” This was grunted. Anna had been caught by a bear. Too bad. Bears ate their fish raw.

“Are you alive?” The bear pawed at her and she was rolled onto her back.

“Hey, Bob,” she said when she saw his red, sweating face.

“Are we going to have to get naked in a sleeping bag together?” he asked.

“Throw me back in,” Anna croaked.

Bob was a hero.

When Anna had gone under, trap and line snaking after her, he’d stomped on his end of the chain to stop it. For a nanosecond, he waited to see if she would resurface.

“Nanosecond” was Bob’s assessment of the time. Anna was fairly sure it had been at least five minutes, never mind that she could only hold her breath for two, and that was under ideal conditions.

The ice was paper thin, Bob told Robin and Katherine, and he’d tugged on the chain so Anna would be able to see it, then pulled her from the lake bottom.

Anna was sufficiently grateful to have been saved from a watery grave that, for a while, she forgot it was Bob who’d put her there. She chose not to remind him of this because he had raised not only her from the dead with nothing but brute strength and determination but her pack as well, trailing behind her by a single shoulder strap.

She remembered nothing of their return to the cabin but knew without a doubt she would have died if Bob had not taken quick action. He’d cut her free of the backpack, stripped her wet coat from her, wrapped her in his own parka and carried her back to Malone Bay.

Clad in dry clothes and propped on the bottom bunk in a sleeping bag, a fourth cup of hot Ovaltine in front of her – the first she’d been able to hold all by herself – Anna listened as Bob again told Robin and Katherine how he’d run the two miles.

“Flat out,” he said. “I knew she was going to die.”

Anna doubted he’d managed to sprint the whole way, but he had covered the ground rapidly. And he was right: she was going to die and now she wasn’t.

“You saved my life, Bob,” she said. “Remind me to buy you a beer sometime.”

He grinned hugely, tucking his chin back into his neck. Anna’s words had been meant to sound grateful and they did. She was. There was no arguing with the feats of strength he had performed. The man was powerful and she was grateful to him. Grateful. For some reason, she had to keep reminding herself of this, and felt small and mean because of it.

Bob Menechinn mystified her. One moment, he was a coward shaking in his boots, a streak of yellow down his back so bright it shone through his thermal undershirt. The next, he was carrying a damsel in distress miles through a storm to safety. Anna had long known that everyone has a panic button. Those who are considered brave are simply people lucky enough to wander through life without theirs getting punched. She’d known men who would scale precipitous cliffs, only to fall apart when a water snake slithered into the tent; women who marshaled the combined forces of Boy Scouts and church camps but would faint at the sight of their own blood.

As near as she could figure, Bob had two Achilles’ heels: he was terrified of wild beasts who were better armed than he and women who knew he was terrified. Watching him bask in glory, Anna wondered if that was why he loved hunting – killing them before they killed him – if that was why he kept Katherine under his thumb.

Fear made some people brave and some dangerous. Bob was in the latter category. Because he was strong, he’d not been afraid he couldn’t carry Anna a couple of miles. He’d also known fishing her out with trap and line would not put him in any danger. And there was no risk of failure. Either he’d succeed or the witness to his humiliation would be dead.