Ridley Pearson - Killer View

He sat down on a rock to quiet himself. It wouldn’t do to handle grenades in this state. He smoked a cigarette and took in the scenery. His plan was a simple one: as a precaution, he would kick an avalanche and cover the Y in Yankee Fork Road, making it impassable. Snowmobiles would be blocked by a giant wall of ice and rock and, to the right, a precipitous drop-off. No one would get through here except on foot.

He heard a buzzing in his ears as he removed the concussion grenade from his satchel, pulled the pin, and heaved it well out into the snowfield. Moments later, he heard its soft cough. Watched as the center of the slope calved and caved simultaneously, an enormous shelf of snow sinking and breaking free from the uniformity above. Snow rippled as the newly created shelf pushed against the snow below, looking like age lines on an elderly face.

The sounds came next: a deep groaning, like the awakening of some great beast. This was interrupted once again by the buzzing whine of an insect, the contained anger pulsing past his ears.

The crack in the slowly shifting shelf of snow widened.

Then he saw what appeared to be a little black bug shooting along the road, and the insect sound took on an entirely new meaning: a snowmobile.

It was barreling down Yankee Fork Road, coming from the direction of Challis. Alone. It all but ruled out the cops; they always traveled in pairs or groups. No, this was some poor shit out on a nature ride who’d chosen the wrong day and the wrong route.

All at once, the snow slid in a massive, beautiful display of the raw power of nature. It was like a dam bursting.

He gloried in the moment, feeling the earth shuddering at his feet, hearing that sound, now more like a jet taking off.

It buried the buzz of the snowmobile, wiped out the soundtrack, silenced the narrator.

It moved first as a unit, as if the whole side of the mountain were falling. But then inertia and momentum collided, and a central chute rose, in a massive upheaval, a wide river of flowing snow, rock, and ice, gorging out the center of the slide and sucking more and more snow and debris down with it. Two huge trees at the edge of the far hill snapped like matchsticks and were carried down, swallowed whole.

And there, still unaware, came the black bug of the snowmobile, curving slowly around the long bend, headed directly into its unforgiving path.

IT BEGAN AS A SHUDDER, AS IF HE’D PUSHED THE SNOWMOBILE too hard, had thrown a belt or burned up some bearings. Walt felt it first in his legs, then his waist, and finally some spinal signal reached his brain that told him to look to his left.

His greatest fear was death by fire, with asphyxiation a close second. This included drowning. But more than drowning, being buried in an avalanche. He’d led enough Search and Rescue teams, both successful and not, to know the horror stories, and to see the results firsthand. If you were lucky enough to survive the churn-and few were-then you found yourself in a sea of blackness, disoriented and buried alive. Death came slowly: as your body chilled into hypothermia, your own breath contaminated what little air existed in your icy tomb and you suffocated, thrown first into hallucination, and, finally, a lung-bursting death.

His first thoughts, as he saw the mountain collapsing toward him, were not thoughts at all but images. He’d pulled out bodies, the faces frozen in looks of madness-terror-ridden masks of inescapable panic.

Then, for just a fraction of a second, above the fluid hillside cascading toward him, he made out the silhouetted shape of a man standing on the distant ridgeline. It might have been his imagination or wishful thinking: wanting to attribute this devil’s work to a man instead of synchronicity, his being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was too big a slide, traveling too fast down the hill, to try to cross its path. The one bit of luck working for Walt was that he’d slowed considerably as he’d headed into the curve, cautious of the range of the sniper’s rifle. He was not quite midslide, an area that looked to cover about two hundred yards. The first boulders of snow tumbled onto and across the cut of the roadbed, itself already buried in four feet of fresh snow. He jacked the handlebars, threw his left leg out, and gassed the accelerator, fishhooking the snowmobile into an about-face and cutting a deep rut that threatened to swallow the machine. Ironically, a snowmobile only worked well in deep snow if moving; if stopped or slowed significantly, it bogged down and was stranded.

The time consumed in turning it around cost him. More chunks of snow-two and three feet across-bounded on the road; the tremendous grinding sound of the slide overwhelmed him and literally shook the mechanized sled beneath him.

The avalanche came down the hill not as an arrow but as a snake’s tongue, its forks faster and more charged than its center. Beyond the road’s man-made, twenty-foot-wide patch of level track, the hill dropped away again precipitously, covered with trees and rock outcroppings.

He wasn’t going to make it: the snowmobile had slowed as a result of the turn and the rush of snow now coming down pushed across the road as a unit, shoving Walt and the snowmobile sideways out in front of its headlong force. He had to make it at least another sixty yards to clear the turn and it wasn’t going to happen.

Walt tugged on the handlebars and jumped the sled off the road. The snowmobile plowed into a drift, and Walt came fully off the seat, attached only by his bloodless grip. Behind him, the roar was unlike anything he’d ever heard: the open throat of a monster. The vehicle pulled up and out of the drift; Walt slammed back down onto the seat and twisted the accelerator, the full force of the avalanche now only yards behind him-a rising wall of debris shoved ahead of its unchecked force. Above the din, he heard the explosions of trees succumbing. The speed with which it now traveled dwarfed his own; one glance back told him as much.

There was no outrunning it.

At an incredible speed increased by the pull of gravity, he slalomed the sled down the hillside, narrowly missing tree trunks and dodging rocks. He tried to back off the accelerator, but it was no use: the whole hillside was moving out in front of that force, like he was riding a carpet being tugged out from under him. With the snow that carried him now itself in motion, the steering became unresponsive; he was no longer in control of the vehicle-the movement of the snow dictated his direction.

He faced a huge snow-covered rock to his right and a stand of massive trees straight ahead. He goosed the accelerator, yanked on the steering yoke-and nothing happened. The snowmobile carried him, as if on tracks, right for the tree trunks.

He leaped free and rolled, scrambling for the lee behind the rock outcropping. It was like swimming in sand. The crush of the avalanche lifted the snow beneath him and he rose like riding a wave. It firmed as it rose, the packed mass out in front, shelving up from under the fresh powder. He came to his knees like a surfer, measured his speed against the fixed position of the intractable rock outcropping, and dove.

Never the most athletic person, Walt nonetheless managed the perfect jump. Now behind the enormous rock that towered some twenty feet overhead, he scrambled on hands and knees to hide in its lee.

The snowmobile crashed into the trees. Walt reached the shelter of the rock face, hugging himself to the stone and gripping it with both gloves. It divided the avalanche, the ice and snow flying past in a deafening roar that terrified him more than the snow itself. Some rocks and chunks of ice flew overhead but landed beyond him, the outcropping fully screening him from the downthrust of the slide. It seemed to last an hour; in all, it was just over four minutes.