Winter Study by Nevada Barr Page B

make them damp and you’ll freeze to
death.”
Anna quit breathing warm air into her bag.
“Will it happen soon?” she asked hopefully.
8
As
challenging as it was to play the Pollyanna glad game with dirty boots
and a hunk of half-eaten cheddar snugged between her thighs, Anna was
glad for the physical demands of the past day. She was so thoroughly
tired that she knew Robin was right; she would sleep. Eventually.
Darkness
inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the
way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. Anna remembered
that crushing blindness, air so hard with earth and ink that it choked
her.
Claustrophobia
tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in
on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling,
adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.
“Enough!” Anna hissed.
An
elbow pressed into her side. Robin. Her feet were jostled. Bob. Bob
Menechinn took up the lion’s share of the space. This was almost
balanced out by Katherine, who had squished herself into the corner
between tent wall and floor until Robin made her move farther in, where
it was marginally warmer.
Cold,
as palpable and suffocating as the crowding night, negated the odors
attendant on such a pile of humanity, but nothing could negate the
ectoplasm — or whatever the stuff was called when people were not yet
dead. The lives of the others fluttered and battered in the enclosure
as if they were captive birds flying against the bars of a too-small
cage.
On
the best of nights, tents were not necessarily Anna’s friend. She’d
woken more than once to claw her way through the opening flap, past the
rain fly, to see the sky and breathe new air. This was not the best of
nights. Forcing her mind away from crazy places, she readjusted the
bagged boots between her knees. Had they been left outside the tent, or
even outside the bag, the boots would freeze, Robin said. There would
be no getting them warm in the morning.
Who knew boots could freeze? Anna could have gone to her grave without knowing that.
Time
passed. The parts of Anna touching the ground cloth numbed. She curled
up as best she could with half of North Face’s inventory jammed in the
sleeping bag with her. The spectral birds began to settle. One by one,
pairs of wings ceased to scrabble on her consciousness. The others
slept. She tucked her hands into her armpits and tried to focus on a
single point of white-hot light in her mind. Shirley MacLaine had done
it with some guru or other and gotten so hot, she felt like she was
burning up. It didn’t do much for Anna. After a time, she drifted into
a chilled coma full of aching dreams.
A
nightmare wind gusted in her ear: “Anna! Anna, wake up!” The second
hiss brought her out of her icy dreams. Her eyes opened to total
blindness, her arms were pinioned to her sides and she couldn’t feel
her legs. She began to panic.
“Listen!”
Robin;
it was Robin. Panic subsided. The biotech had hold of her shoulder. She
was pressed so close Anna felt her breath on her cheek. It was warm.
Anna remembered warm. “What—”
“Shh. Listen,” came into her ear on a balmy breeze.
Anna listened.
Beyond
the tent walls, the preternatural stillness of a night, frozen into a
timeless instant, creaked in her ears. With a mittened paw, she shoved
her hat up the better to hear. Silence, thick as an ice floe, pressed
against her eardrums.
“There it is again.”
Now
Anna heard it. Into this concrete quiet came the pad of a soft-footed
animal, an animal heavy enough that the snow squeaked under its weight.
Faint and ethereal, the sound moved around the tent, then stopped.
Anna’s ears rang with the emptiness and she tried to sit up, but Robin
was on Anna’s left arm and the detritus of Anna’s life was tangled
around her body.
A
thin skritching sound scratched through the black air, clogging Anna’s
ears. Whatever it was pawed at the rain fly. “Fox,” Anna