Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [41]
-28-
Ron rises up slowly out of the trench.
It has stopped snowing, the sky blackish-cobalt, infected with stars.
He thinks he hears voices on the far side of town, but as he spins slowly around, he sees nothing but dark houses, smoke the only movement, trickling out of chimneys.
-29-
The snow comes to his knees.
He jogs through the powder, staying on the west edge of town where backyards border a stream that has all but frozen over, eyeing the dark windows of the houses he runs by.
The stream curves him back toward Main as he approaches the north edge of town, and ten minutes after striking out from the snow fort, he moves past the city park and the torched Benz, the frame of the SUV having cooled just in time to allow for the collection of a delicate half-inch of powder.
-30-
The sign reads, “Road Closed Due to Hazardous Driving Conditions.”
Ron swings a leg over, briefly straddling the yellow gate.
He falls onto the other side, engulfed by snow, stands up and brushes his clothes off as best he can, his fingers stiff, on a welcome descent from excruciating toward a beautiful numbness.
Beyond exhaustion, he sets off at the fastest walk he can manage, while in the east, the sky lightens above a skyline of jagged peaks—a warm lavender that chokes out the stars.
He trudges on through the predawn silence, crying, thinking, Jess is dead.
Passes another sign: “Aspen 23.”
The road climbs at a five percent grade, and he stops, breathless after an hour of walking, looks back, sees the valley the town rests in five hundred feet below where he stands.
He inhales a shot of cold, thin air. The spruce trees on the left side of the road droop with snow. Off the right shoulder, the mountainside falls away in a series of cliffs and steep forest, a thousand feet down to a frozen river.
He hears a distant growl.
The way the echo carries, it sounds like a vehicle coming down the mountain, but the lights—four of them—race up the road out of Lone Cone.
In the calm, subzero air, he studies the tone of their motors, the velocity with which they travel over the buried highway.
Snowmobiles.
He starts running, gets ten steps, then stops, looks back down the road—a narrow plane descending into Lone Cone, his tracks as clear as day.
Up ahead, the road makes a sharp left turn with the contour of the mountain.
Nothing to do but run, his arms pumping again, the momentary adrenaline charge making up for the loss of air.
The whine of the motors sounds like a swarm of giant bees closing in as he reaches the curve in the road, the noisy snowmobiles dropping into silence as he puts the mountain between them and himself.
He looks back over his shoulder trying to—
A horn screams.
He turns back to face a huge orange truck, ten feet and closing.
Ron bee-lines for the left shoulder and dives into a snowbank as the plow rushes by, burying him under sixty pounds of snow as the blade scrapes the powder off the road.
-31-
Ron lies on his back, suffocating in darkness, clawing at the snow and on the verge of losing consciousness.
His hand breaks through, fresh air flooding in, accompanied by idling snowmobiles and nearby voices.
He pulls his hand back into his chest, wondering if he’s been seen, enough of the snow on top of him pushed away to glimpse a piece of the morning sky and an overhanging fir tree.
Two helmeted figures walk into view, Ron praying he won’t have to fight, his fingers so numb he can’t even feel them holding the ice ax.
The two figures gaze up the mountainside for several minutes.
One of them shrugs.
Then they walk back into the road, out of view.
He can hear them talking, can’t pick out a single word.
After a while, the snowmobiles wind up and