CHAPTER 1
She would not remember theutter nothingness of the unconscious. How could she? She was notlevitating over her body making disinterested decisions all the whilebedazzled by a radiance beckoning, summoning from an alluring andinfinite tunnel. She was, quite simply, not there—gripped by the vastvoid of an insensate brain.
Only later would she recapture the ephemeral portents of someincalculable, mystifying cosmic beyond: premonitions paling beforea vast, immutable silence. A silence like death; like the utter stillnessof a shroud. Or tomb.
A silence melding with a fear so devastating, so absolute, that itwould haunt the remainder of her life. A grasping, insidious fear it was,coupling with consciousness as it stole back ... meandering at firstthrough veils of ethereal mists then hammering through explodingpinwheels of light. It was ominous, this awakening, for oxygenwas scant ... going rare. Bitter recognition seared her brain evenas the swelling bloat of carbon dioxide began re-stealing awareness.Suffocating, spinning with terror ... she gasped, I'm suffocating.
Breathe in and out. Calmly now, she cautioned reeling reason:a breath in, a breath out. Yet it seemed a mere heartbeat before herbreathing segued to a shallow panting. Then snuffling inhalationsthrough life sustaining passageways now clogged and blocked. Sourvapors rose from her stomach. Her eyes flew wide open and—wereblind. Warm supple orbs roughen by relentless alabaster! Snow. Socold, so pure. Everywhere, snow. Weighty and resolute. A ghastlycrypt of snow!
Avalanche! Clamored her oxygen-starved gray cells. Anavalanche! What else? A goddamn silent, slithering, lethal sea ofwhite death. And death? Her death. A scream erupted, echoing inher mind, repulsing the blank, black vortex of dread. Real or psychic,the scream ignited a surge of adrenalin-driven action. She flailed.She writhed and thrashed against her frigid sepulcher. Only thendid she truly grasp the dimensions of her confinement: The absolutemass squeezing her down, down, as a fossil compressed by snow.And one leg trapped, folded into utter immobility as a limb of anunfortunate beast is pinioned in a lock-jawed trap. Her shoulders, herchest bowed under a terrifying weight yet she commenced a franticdigging, a dog paddling ... clawing, wriggling and wrenching. OUT!OUT GOD! Please! ... out. But which ... way ... was ... out?Which way? Please, God, which goddamn way was out?
`Spit! Hurry and spit, 'screamed her flagging brain (inspired by aattentive deity?) as she spiraled down, down into hysteria. `Spit', herdiminishing reason pleaded, `spit falls with gravity. Spit falls down!'A tongue as sluggish and wooly as a caterpillar probed a mouthas dry as an old maiden aunt.
`Oh god! Lemons!' The panicking cortex howled. `Think lemons.Think them now, fool ... before you cease to think at all!'
Lemons? Beautiful citrus, rich golden acidic spheres? Suchfabulous images coupled with her autonomic system and squirtingbursts of saliva filled her mouth and ... she spit. A feeble effort, yetsaliva trickled over her lips, slid down her cheeks, slowly drippeddown. So ... it was up then? Wasn't it? Wasn't it? Up? Up tosalvation? Rudimentary thought had gone as arduous and evanescentas nuclear physics and yet, in a single pure flash of cognition, clear asStolichnaya she knew ... Up.
Silent were her screams, yet a frenzied grunting beat in herauditory canals. In a near terminal burst of life, single operational legkicking like fury, her survival bent body twisted and bench pressedsnow; that terrible killing snow packed tight as a coffin. Now shewas hyperventilating, even on ever diminishing oxygen and clouds ofgray mist summoned even as her desperate limbs continued striking,struggling, heaving. When suddenly—all at once—there came acreaking and cracking, a shuddering—and at last (thank you god!) aminor fault opened giving way to a rush of oxygen. Blessed oxygen!Face thrust through the jagged fissure, she sucked in great gratefulgasps, whoops of air ... exquisite, splendid air.
And snow fell all around. Dense thickets of snow, fat white flakesfrom invisible heavens: dancing, falling. God and luck! Kismet andserendipity! She forced her arms through the crust, pawed the snowfrom her most fortunate head and breathed ... beauteous, invisible,life-sustaining gas.
The beatitudes of this life-salvaging marvel was soon followedby an ugly coughing disgorge: a heaving vomiting detritus of thenoon's eats splashing hot across the snow, where it pooled, stinkingand steaming; the mess soon vanishing, sinking away like an aliencorrosive. A honking paroxysm chased the foul regurgitation:dreadful gluts of snow and snot mixed and, at length, a great gushingburst of bright blood spewed from nasal tissues too long dehydratedby the arid High Sierra days and nights. Dear God, she thoughtpanting with exhaustion, red ice freezing on her cheeks, dear god,breath is a wonderful thing! And life. Fragile life—and all life'sbounty; amazing friends, great times, joie de vive! Yet, in a instant itcame to this: death at the door, death at one's back, lurking unseen,scheming and plotting; the drunk driver careening across the median;the Sonny Bono head snap against wood, the treacherous revolt ofbodily tissues, terrorists exploding random destruction ...
With the passage of time the beat of her heart slowed, a measureof strength crept back—and with it the ardent desire to escape thiswinter wonderland transmogrified from beauty to terror in a momentshe could no longer recall. She dug out. Her torso excavated fromthe tenacious clutch of snow she paused for an inventory. Well. Hergoggles were missing; hat absent; poles gone AWOL. Now (way toolate) she keenly regretted skiing (upon orthopedic advice) withoutattaching her ski poles to her person via the handy wrist straps. Ahso. It seemed that at least one ski was still attached to her person.And that buried at an excruciating angle. Cautiously she tunneled,after a time extracted the bent leg and with difficulty, for her fingerswere far from steady, released the ski. Carefully she manipulated thesquashed limb now shrieking with the painful lances of returningsensation, eventually deducing that broken bones were unlikely. So,crabbed the nagging voice that had surfaced shortly after she hadbecome a grateful member of Alcoholics Anonymous: Ha! Losing aski, now that's a pig fuck of a loss!! (The voice was both opinionatedand profane.) You can ski without poles, fool, but without a pair of skis,walking is what you'll be doing. Shaking away the irritating voice sheanchored her remaining ski upright, like a beacon, and searched forits mate. Limping through the deluge she hunted along a makeshiftgrid. And was it surprising—with an inadequate grid, limitedvisibility, and hobbled by thigh deep snow—that the explorationturned up nothing? Except the disquieting knowledge that she hadtumbled out of bounds, into a snow choked declivity some fifteenfeet from the groomed trail and that she had but one ski—count`em, only one—and a long way to travel downhill. A gust of wind,changing vectors, squeezed violently between the thicket of pinesand flung an icy glot of challenge in her face.
In the whole of the universe, she wondered crossly, arming snowcrystals from her face, unraveling the hood from her suit's collar andsecuring it snugly over her head, was there anything more uselessthan powder cords? Those long brightly colored tails designed toattach to both skis and boots ... handy recognition devices usefullystored in her ski locker, miles and miles westward?
Well, get the fuck up and walk, telegraphed her rude, impatientbrain. Walk out, woman. That's all there is.
And so it was. Having so far survived, Ceska was unwillinglyto succumb to the elements while sitting on her ass. Up she hauledherself, up from her cold, white tuffet; and using the remaining ski asan awkward hiking stick commenced trudging. And was distressedto find her legs as quivering and fearful as though she had suddenlybeen transported to the horrifying southeast ridge of Mt. Everest. Sheskidded and lurched. The going was arduous for the snow was thickand her inflexible, heavy ski boots had, certainly, little resemblanceto hiking boots and less yet to snow shoes. The vista did not inspire:gray and dismal, visibility maybe ten feet. Imagination declared thatit might as damn well be Mt. Everest. She slogged and fell. Totteredto her feet, scoured the snow from her pinched features and ploddedon. Always down hill and ever with misery. The wrathful stormdelivered despair: cruel, howling wind bit each fragment of exposedskin, worried her outerwear and wormed coldly, stealthily into anyfissure, immediately chilling the trickle of sweat she felt slitheringbetween her breasts. Avalanche indeed! She scoffed, distracting hermind from contemplation of the lengthy trek ahead. (For she didnot believe she had been skiing long before her catastrophic flightand knew all too well that a two-minute zip down a mountain slopemight equal an all-afternoon tramp on foot.) Moron! By then shehad thoroughly acknowledged that her notion of an avalanche hadbeen fanciful. What it was: she had taken one whopper of a fall. Herown damn fault too, with little active intervention by nature or othermalign forces. Sliding and stumbling, she limped on, head hunchedinto shoulders. From the corner of her eye she saw—or thought shesaw—a pride of dark and hungry shapes. Her mouth flooded with asour coppery fluid. Her heart beat at her temples. Lions and tigers andbears oh my! Crafty shapes disappearing into shadows. Shapes certainto come hunting again, and soon; prowling with their dangerousclaws and pointed, hungry fangs. She staggered sideways and pitchedheadlong into the snow, fortuitously landing smack on her remainingski, forestalling its efforts to make off downhill disappearing throughthe chilly white curtains. Ceska pulled her wretched self to her knees;slumped her head into her gloved hands. Damned if it wasn't oneof life's abrupt right turns, she reflected, as she had more and moreoften since September 11, 2001. Just when you were minding yourown damn business, a lurking rabbit hole yawned beneath your feetand it was down the chute into the maw of unspeakable monsters.Or up whooshed Dorothy's twister and pouff, just like that, youawoke to find yourself in fucking Oz ... with all those poppy fieldsand ugly witches, grasping monkeys and a bent wizard! Or younever woke at all, were just ... gone: vaporized in tons and tons ofcrushing, cascading, incinerating rubble. Amazing how things couldgo so rotten in a flash.
And how amazing to have lived in a world of such colossalinnocence for so very long.
Just a little rest, she told herself, just a moment or two shepromised, as her memory roamed back, not that far back actually—couldit really be measured in minutes, she wondered? Back to ridingthe chair lift that afternoon, back before mishap.
Oh, how she wished to play it again, Sam: replay the wholecrappy, calamitous scene. Back where it had all begun ... or so shethen believed.
CHAPTER 2
Had it only been that afternoon?Oh, yes. A jubilant afternoon advancing amidst incandescent torrentsof sunlight into the lengthening daylight hours of early April. Therehad been magic in the air. And the sort of enchantment that flutterson playful breezes promising romance. That such a afternoon mightyet be overtaken by violence and terror was quite beyond imagining.Yet it had been but a matter of elapsed minutes—certainly nothours—when dark, coyote-shaped clouds had stretched their wickedsnoots across the splendid azure mountain sky, presaging a change inthe weather. The beasts, racing on swelling winds, vanquished blueskies and sunshine. Gusts converted over to torrents and proliferatedinto howling crescendos with a rapidity unheard of in most areaswhere the civilized ski—but a commonplace phenomenon atMammoth Mountain Ski Resort, sprawling high in the Sierras ofCentral California.
`Here we go again,' she had thought, with perverse satisfaction,`the old Mammoth we know and love.' For Mammoth was fickle asTed Bundy; one moment the most charming gentleman in the world,the next a toothy monster rendering flesh. It's famously capriciousweather could dispatch an eclipse of sun and blue skies to a whiteoutso vertiginous that grown men had been known to crawl keening onthe ground.
It had been twenty minutes, no more, from slip-sliding over thelovely snow-cat crunched snow dusting a hard packed eight footbase, in balmy temperatures and glorious sunshine, to huddlingprecariously on Chair 12, a decrepit and creaking two-seater. Ananachronism given the recent Mammoth Mountain spiffing up, andslow. There they hung Linda and Ceska, with visibility decreased bypelting precipitation and life expectancy diminished by the violentswinging of the chair. Like a Ferris wheel run amok. It's not like theyhadn't been there, done this before. God forbid they ought ever beconsidered `fair weather skiers', a sin only slightly less humiliatingthan having a man buckle your ski boots.
"Why?" she had wondered, huddling down like a prudenttortoise. "Why just one more run, way over here on the eastern side,when we lodge two long lifts and three heavy duty downhill runsaway in the western sector?"
Sector ... not a bad descriptive choice. Mammoth wasn't like`the bear went over the mountain to see what he could see'—if he didhe'd have a bloody long walk. Mammoth, you see, was aptly named.Mammoth skiing playground was gargantuan, some six hundred andforty acres, but more horizontal than the verticality of, say, Vail.
"This is all Johanna's fault," she considered crossly (ignoring herown complicity. After all, who needs follow where others lead?). Ithad been Johanna who insisted (in her own silky diplomatic waythat never felt like insistence at all) that they spend the afternoonskiing way the hell over here in God's country, just about as far easton the mountain as one could ski. In truth, it was not an infrequentafternoon choice—for, since other skiers often shunned St. Anton'sfar reaches, the snow remained of good quality.
As the chair rocked wildly, grazing a stanchion and jump-startingher heart, it was little trouble for Ceska to ignore the facts: It hadbeen heads up sunny when Johanna had contrived their jaunt tothe far off reaches of San Anton's. And, fact was that as the bestand strongest skier Johanna was often considered, `the leader of thepack'. Here Ceska had added a couple of imaginary revs from illusorymotorcycles just to spice up her reveries, keep her spirit from flaggingunder the weight of the crap weather. Johanna of the bouncing blackcurls, rollicking green eyes, kind and lusty, spilling over with bigheartedhumor. Johanna was also the youngest ... and beautiful. Hadit been only that afternoon that Ceska had hung back, anchoringthe slinky, observing Johanna? How gorgeous she was, sailing overthe lip of the Cornice run! All lean and laughing elegance, Johanna,black stretch jumpsuit covered over by a midnight blue velvetBogner parka, nipped at the waist, trimmed around the hood withfur. Heavier precipitation arrived with a whoosh disrupting Ceska'sblame game. A sudden onslaught ... dense ... somber. Dark thicketsof ice coursed from the pitted iron lid of the sky. Some skiers claimedit was snow. To the rest of the world, snow was white, light stuff withfar fewer sharp points. Some optimists went farther, calling this junk"powder". Pessimists thought it resembled over-watered cement.
Now, powder, the favorite ride of some skiers and snow boarders,did exist, if rarely, in California. Coloradoans? Coloradoites? Beatsme, she thought giggling wickedly into the shriek of the storm.People who resided in Colorado did tend to prattle on about theirchampagne powder: golden ... ambrosia. So light that one couldblow it, poof, from a fingertip like the feathers from a dandelion goneto seed. Naw ... don't need no stinkin' powder in Mammoth!
Linda and Ceska had been the first of the group to disgorgefrom the rickety conveyance. The ferocious wind had beaten themback and while Ceska had managed to pole out of the way Lindawas smacked a good whap on the back as the chair passed on it'srepetitious journey. Shit, Ceska had thought fleetingly, when thingswent bad, damned if they didn't tend to head south in a hurry. (Andback then a storm and a whack from a chair lift amounted to trouble!)With nowhere to ski into a bit of seclusion, for Chair 12 disgorgedonto a windswept pinnacle, the two women had huddled together,slightly downhill where the lift was still visible, and waited for theothers. Pulling the cuffs of her snowsuit snugly over the tops of herothers. Pulling the cuffs of her snowsuit snugly over the tops of hergloves Ceska comforted herself with warm and hungry thoughts—afire snapping poppers at the hearth, steaming bowls of chili ...
