Chapter 4 - The Maintenance Station
“We have a signal!” the snowcat driver yelled, slamming his hand against the dashboard as the vehicle crested the ridge. “Unit Four just radioed in! They found her!”
I threw open the snowcat door before the vehicle had even come to a complete halt, tumbling out into the waist-deep powder.
The wind whipped across the mountain like a physical blade, tearing at my wool coat, but I felt no cold. I ran through the whiteout, stumbling, falling to my knees, pushing myself up, scrambling toward the yellow flashing lights of three emergency rescue snowmobiles parked outside a half-buried concrete bunker.
It was an abandoned State Department maintenance station, six miles down the valley from her collapsed cabin.
“Clara!” I screamed into the storm, my lungs burning with ice. “Clara!”
Two paramedic officers cleared the bunker’s metal door, wheeling a heavy orange rescue sled out onto the snow pack. Wrapped in three layers of foil thermal blankets and an oxygen mask was a tiny, motionless form.
I lunged forward, but two sheriff deputies caught my shoulders, holding me back.
“Sir! Stay back! Let the paramedics work!”
“That’s my wife!” I roared, thrashing against their grip with a desperate, wild strength. “Clara!”
The form on the sled stirred.
Slowly, painfully, a pale, frostbitten hand lifted from beneath the thermal foil. Clara opened her eyes. They were sunken, surrounded by dark purple bruises, her skin translucent as wax.
She looked at me standing in the blizzard, wearing my five-thousand-dollar designer coat, shivering in my thin shoes.
She pulled the oxygen mask down an inch from her cracked lips. Her voice was barely a raspy whisper against the wind.
“When... when did you find out I was missing, Ethan?”
I froze. The grip of the deputies slackened, but I couldn't move a single step forward. My tongue felt like lead in my mouth.
I couldn't lie to her. Not here. Not now.
“...Today?” she whispered.
May you like
My complete, suffocating silence gave her the answer.
A faint, bitter smile touched the corner of her blue lips—a smile of total, absolute finality. She turned her head away from me, pulling the oxygen mask back over her face, refusing to look at me again as the paramedics lifted her into the back of the heated medical unit.
