Snowblind by Daniel Arnold Read Free Book Online Page A

their gills and asphyxiation. Ann feels driven before the same lash. Hungry, jagged, adrift and unable to stop.
    Snowflakes shake out of the dirty cotton overhead. Little buggers look fat enough to eat. Ann imagines running around with her mouth open and her tongue out in a blizzard of barbecue drippings. She licks them off her glove. Cold ice. Damn. The flakes pour down in lazy, windless spirals. Ann retreats deep behind her eyes, away from the snow and the lines tracing themselves through the air right in front of her face. She nearly runs into a copse of twenty stunted alders.
    Trees. Trees. Ann’s eyes all but pop out of their sockets in their eagerness. Awareness rushes to the surface. She may yet come backfrom the dead, a thought Ann hasn’t entertained since she exited shit creek without her compass. The trees stand isolated. There are rocks under the new snow, and withered old snow-ice shows through gaps. Could be a glacial edge. Could be a skin of rock and soil riding the back of the glacier. One way or the other, Ann has located the land of the living.
    The snow keeps dumping, and Ann keeps walking, past rocks, shells of wind-carved ice, a rubble ridge that has to be a moraine. Alders come out of the ground. The land is changing, tidewater approaching.
    Ann hits a chain-link wall of alders. There is rock and snow underfoot, snow in the air. No chance of walking forward. The trees are knit tight. Left or right? She can see about forty feet in either direction. Ann chooses right—it beats standing there deciding. She follows the wall of growth to where it turns ragged and the rocks end at the edge of glacial ice. Back on the glacier again? Ann struggles to put the jigsaw cuts of the map together in her mind—she has about six pieces out of five hundred, and none of them fit with the others. It isn’t just the map; her mind’s also full of gaps. The cold has its wedges in her. Hunger digs into her brain.
    Ann stays in the fringe of the alder pack, unwilling to let the trees out of her sight. There she flounders. Loose rocks somersault under the snow. Gaps in the alders suck her in, then pinch off and force her back out. Her instinct for direction scatters like de-flocked birds. She’s close, she’s sure of it. But the fatigue, the drowning panic, return. She can feel the suck of a downward spiral. She detaches herself from the trees, gets back out on open ice. Forten minutes she walks, seeing nothing but skydiving snowflakes six inches in front of her eyes. The alders reappear. This time on her right. The same trees or new? Ann tries to scream. What comes out is hoarse and pathetic. Where is the goddamn ocean? It’s only the biggest thing on earth.
    Ann zeros in on a brown boulder that appears ahead through the snowfall. She knows she hasn’t seen it before. She’ll turn it into a landmark, trace out a map with search patterns and a center. She needs a system, that’s all. Twenty feet away, the rock shrugs and swings a huge dished-out moon face Ann’s way.
    Two things Ann hates: Avalanches. Bears. Big, dumb, unpredictable, uncontrollable. Randomness given mass and teeth.
    The bear lifts its head. Its eyes are small, black, unbelievably far apart. It’s fucking huge. Ann doesn’t move, couldn’t move. She’s locked down. She has often sensed that a mountain has its teeth in her. Now the feeling hits her as physical pain, as if the bear has already crunched her. The bear stands up on its hind legs, sticks its nose in the air. Ann imagines airborne traces of her sweat, her fear, her exhaustion, going down that big brown snout. The bear is so close she sees the bristles in its lips. Mentally, Ann gives herself the finger, kisses herself goodbye. Two bounds, and the bear will be at her. It’s going to be over in less than a second. At least the bear won’t get much satisfaction out of her skinny ass. Ann stands straight, prepares to let the bear