Girl in Ice(79)

“He woke up alive?”

Jeanne shifted her weight, set the gun down on her worktable—still aimed at us—and sat on a stool. Her face had gone slack and pale, lost its determination. “Yeah.”

I took a step toward her. Clutched the handle of the hammer, now warm in my pocket. Hit her hit her hit her. But I couldn’t. I had to know. “How did he die?”

“You stay back,” she hissed, fingering the trigger.

I complied.

“It was like this,” she said, entering a kind of reverie. “Wyatt grilled him hard, but Andy? He was tough. He would not let on about what he injected. Just flat-out refused. It was this power thing with those two. But your brother, he… he really got it wrong. Wyatt’s temper, I mean. He should have just spilled the beans. I mean, he was real weak when he came out of it—Andy was—and Wyatt hurt him, he—he cut him, but your brother, he just smiled and smiled like he had the world by the tail—”

I took a step toward her, the hammer half out of my pocket.

She seized the gun and I stumbled backward, the hammer dropping into the recesses of my coat as I struggled to keep Sigrid in my grip. “You get back!” she cried, her voice hoarse with emotion.

She waved the barrel of the gun in my face, forcing me closer to the freezer. Phantoms of cold sank into my back as Sigrid whimpered in my ear. This was her last day, the final circle on all her drawings, torn and bloodied with red ink.

“You have no idea about that morning. You couldn’t imagine it. It was—Everything happened so fast. I couldn’t stop him. I tried, but he just, he lost it. He—he grabbed a cushion and held it over Andy’s face, and I couldn’t—and then he put him back outside, just like we found him. Only he was really dead then. Wyatt said I was part of the whole thing, that I was guilty too.”

“That makes no sense—”

“But it does,” she said, wiping away tears of rage or shame. “When Andy thawed out alive, Wyatt said to get out. Leave them alone. He didn’t want me to know things I wasn’t supposed to know. But I wouldn’t do it, I refused, because I had a bad feeling about what Wyatt was gonna do, and I was right, so you see, if I’d left like he asked me to, maybe he wouldn’t have—”

“Wyatt murders my brother, and you do his dirty business out here with us. Why’s that, Jeanne?”

“Enough.” She shook off any emotional residue and lifted the gun. “You, you get the hell in there.”

“Just let us go, Jeanne.”

“Go?” she snorted. “Where ya gonna go? This is for the best. The best.”

“We could try to find the eels.” I eyed the keys to the snowmobile hanging just over the worktable. “You could help us! Or just let us—”

“Shut your trap.”

“Anything for Wyatt, right? Doesn’t matter what he asks you to do, you just do it—”

“Get in the fucking freezer!”

Every shred of humanity leached from her face as she charged me, poking the barrel of the gun into my belly. I backed away, but she was relentless, jabbing me in the gut over and over, eyes half-mad. I staggered backward, stepping up onto the steel platform of the walk-in, Sigrid’s arms so tight around my neck I was close to choking. The ice cores in their neat rows glittered in the bleached light. Before I could draw a breath, the heavy door slammed shut and the bulb snapped off.





thirty-five


Complete and utter darkness.

Unfathomable cold.

Hell.

Instinctually, I narrowed my eyes, blinking fast to keep them from freezing open or shut. Let barely enough air in my lungs to breathe—I simply couldn’t warm it with my body. I knew I had a handful of minutes before my fingers froze. Blindly, I unzipped my jacket. Sigrid had welded herself to my torso; I peeled her arms and legs from me, forcing her to the floor of the freezer. She cried out pitifully.

“Sigrid.” I bent down to her in the blackness, both of us gasping at the stinging air. “Brave girl, strong girl.” I pulled her parka tighter around her, flipped up her hood and cinched it, all by feel. Her cheeks icy, her hot, quick breath in my face. She mewled, clutching at my snow pants. Tried to monkey her way up my legs, but I hauled her away. “Stay by the door.” I lifted her and set her down facing it, or where I remembered it to be. “Sit here. Stay still.”

I stepped away from her, into the center of the terrible cold black box. From the darkness she cried out, “Bahl!” I heard her crawling toward me.

“No, Sigrid, no!” I groped for her, found her hood, gripped her shoulders tight. “Don’t move. Taimagiakaman, okay? Taimagiakaman.” The necessity of staying alive. I half led, half dragged her back to the door; this time she let me. “Sigrid. Wait for me. Here.”

The moment I was convinced she had understood me, I grappled my way along the door, along the side wall of the cube, to the cache of cores stacked in their wooden cradles. Stopped, listened. The skin of my face stiffened as it froze. The blockade of ice rods radiated their own glacial breath. I could barely move my fingers anymore, my blood a frozen sludge, mind congealing.

Turning in a small circle, I called for Sigrid. Her answering moan oriented me in the space, but I couldn’t waste another second. I pulled the ball-peen hammer from the deep inner pocket of my parka, wound up, and swung at the bank of cores. Ice daggers blasted at my pant legs, stabbed me in the cheek near my eye. Again and again I pounded at a thousand years of Arctic climate history. Fragments of wood and ice skidded across the floor. I shut my eyes and didn’t stop. I might have been screaming.