Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (15 page)

He didn’t.

He just saw Frank Angel coming on through
the deep snow and threw another shot at him. When that didn’t have
any effect, Buddy McLennon jumped down off his rock and, levering
the action of the carbine, stumbled forward through the snow toward
Angel, shouting curses as he came.

Sitting duck, Angel thought without
pity.

He knelt down in the snow and put three
bullets through Buddy McLennon at sixty-five yards. There wasn’t a
hand span between them and they tore the life out of the kid in a
bursting bloody spray that turned the snow behind his whacked-down
body pink within a radius of four feet. Angel wasted no time on the
fallen McLennon, but ran as fast as he could through the drag of
the snow, heading for the rocks from which the kid had emerged.

No horses. That meant Falco had the horses.
It also meant that Angel was in deep trouble. Almost as if Falco
had read his mind, Angel heard the soft, snow-muffled thump of
hoofs moving on the soft snow and he caught movement up the trail.
Falco was moving out, heading up the long valley of the pass toward
the no longer visible slopes. They were now hidden behind the
misting grayness that had come up from the lower valleys. The sky
had turned the color of lead left outdoors, and the wind was making
a sound not far from the whine of anguish. Snow, which had moments
before touched his face like feathers, now had a cutting edge that
whipped red rawness across Angel’s cheekbones. Beneath the heavy
blanket coat he felt the soft pull of the drying blood sticking to
his shirt. He stood by the huge rocks, the useless carbine in his
hanging hand, eyes bleak and empty.

And then the blizzard was upon him.

One minute he was out in the open, the air
chilling, the light leaden, the wind sharpening. The next minute
there was a roar as if some mighty machine had started turning and
the wind came up out of the valley like the exhalation of a dying
giant, whipping the snow off the sharp crests of the drifts in a
horizontal hail that battered and snatched, slashed and rocked him,
taking his breath away with its sudden ferocity. Floundering,
blinded, his sense of direction gone completely in the few seconds
that it had taken for the blizzard to spring up, and fighting down
the chill of panic, Angel cursed himself, cursed his stupidity in
not reading the signs fast enough. The gray mist that had been
creeping up the slopes like soapy water, the strange light, all had
been warnings. He should have read them as clearly as those first
dancing flurries of snow, the icy edge of the wind. Now its howling
gale force cut through his layered clothing as if it were tissue
paper. The long wound on his back ached raw as the icy fingers of
the blizzard found it; his bloodstained coat was already frozen
stiff. His leg went down to the crotch in deep snow and he could no
longer even see the faint traces of the trail he had been standing
on.

He dragged himself up out of the clutching
snow, fighting off the soft insistent chill of it, laboring up an
incline in what he hoped was the direction that Falco had taken.
His mouth sagged open and the wind tore his breath out of it as it
drove an incessant hail of minuscule ice splinters against his
skin, scouring his face to raw pink and then flat white in minutes.
It pushed and bullied his staggering body off-balance, and if he
had not strapped down the brim of his Stetson with his neckerchief
to protect his ears, and a wool scarf around his face, he would
have been frostbitten in no time. The wind rattled and flurried and
harassed him. The brim of his Stetson beat in a frenzied staccato
against his cheeks, making red marks.

He labored on.

A hundred yards, perhaps. More? He was
exhausted when the wind stopped as abruptly as it had begun and he
saw that, miraculously, he was close to the big rock behind which
Falco had hidden. He silently thanked whatever gods were guiding
his footsteps in the right directions, and staggered through the
silent snow past the big rock and up toward the long crest that
sloped away beyond it. He did not bother to look for tracks: the
snow and wind would have scoured them away almost as soon as they
were made. He broke into a lumbering run, his breath ragged.
Although he was already worn down, he knew he had to cover as much
ground as he could before the blizzard broke loose again. This was
nothing but a momentary respite. He found he was still clutching
the Winchester and he threw it away without a second’s hesitation.
It landed barrel-down in the snow like a spear, remaining upright,
stuck in the empty whiteness as if it were marking a grave.

Angel had covered about a quarter of a
mile—during which time he remembered he had not taken any food from
the saddlebags on the dead horse—when the wind opened up again.
There was nothing he could do but turn his back to it like any
other animal, hunching down in misery away from the slashing,
seeking, incessant attack of the blizzard, seeing nothing but empty
whirling whiteness, hearing nothing but the roaring howl of the
wind and the soft sibilant sound of the snow sliding across the icy
surface. He stood stoically through endless minutes of mind-emptied
waitfulness, not thinking, not hoping, not doing anything until, as
if gathering its strength for a final assault, the wind eased,
sagged, dropped away. A fitful, watery patch of sunlit blue sky
showed for an instant through swirling cloud. By the time it had
opened up slightly, Angel was already moving up the hill. He went
at it with the desperate strength of a man without much in reserve.
The slope faced north and the snow was deep and crisp. It covered
the rocks and gullies with a deceptive layer of whipped-cream
softness. If Angel put too much weight on his feet, he sank into it
to the hip. He had to move fast, yet lightly on his feet, keeping
his balance against the playful bluster of the wind. The slope
seemed endless, endless. His breath came shallower now in the thin
mountain air and his lips were as dry as if he were in some
waterless desert. It wasn’t a long slope, perhaps not more than two
hundred and fifty yards. He could see the crest, soft and rounded
against the sky ahead. It wasn’t physically far away but it took
him the best part of thirty minutes to get two-thirds of the way up
it and by the time he got there he was almost weeping with fatigue.
He looked back downhill at the painfully traced line of boot-holes
he had left. They seemed so pathetically few that it was almost
impossible to believe they had taken so much out of him. He put his
head down and went on. To keep his feet moving he chanted an old
work song under his breath. There was nobody to witness his
heroism, nobody to cheer. And when he got to the top and saw that
beyond this slope lay another, identical one, it almost broke his
heart.

He stood on the crest, knee-deep in the
sifting snow, his shoulders laboring like some cruelly treated
animal. He shook his head. He could not go any further, nor could
he retrace his steps. He wanted to sit down, to rest. The wound in
his back was on fire, and one small part of his brain was trying to
persuade him that it didn’t really matter, anyway, that it wasn’t
worth the effort, that there was no place to hide, no place to find
shelter. Beyond the next slope would be another and beyond that
another. In this gleaming hostile wilderness, what difference did
it make which pile of snow you died in?

He made himself get up and walk.

Right. Left. Right foot. Left foot. Keep
going, he told himself, just a bit further. Right foot. Left foot.
Just a bit further. Then he saw the deep wide trenches in the snow
made by the horses and he felt a gush of relief. Not only was he on
the right track, but Falco was in as much trouble as he was
himself. The horses looked as if they were out of hand, if the
tracks were anything to go by. Bucking snow was an art natural only
to the native-born mustang. Domesticated animals seldom acquired
the art, and were inclined always to lunge at the snow rather than
work their way through it. Even the wiry cayuse would sometimes
give out after working its way through snow up to its belly for a
few hours. Falco’s horses wouldn’t last another hour if the tracks
on the snow were anything to go by. Angel grinned grimly beneath
the wool scarf and plodded on, moving easier now in the flattened
snow of the horses’ passage. The edge of the wind whipped at the
skin of his face that was exposed and he prayed for the blizzard to
hold off. He got halfway up the long empty slope. It seemed as if
he had been walking forever. He had no thought except the thought
of putting one foot in front of the other foot, no sense of time,
nothing except the single-minded aim to survive.

When he got to the crest of the long second
slope he saw the cabin. It lay about a quarter of a mile away, on
the flank of another long slope that stretched away downward from
where Angel now stood. Falco’s tracks led directly toward it and he
nodded as he saw them. The powder snow whipped off the edge of the
crest in a knife-edge line that whitened the creases in the icy
mush that had formed on his clothing, and Angel drove his wilting
body down the slope, below the lee of the crest where he could
shelter for a moment from the biting, growing rush of the wind,
drawing upon his last reservoirs of strength. I can make it, he
told himself. I can make it now. The wind moaned and then screamed
and then opened its throat with a banshee wail as it clamped down
the blizzard upon the mountains with an awful, intense finality. It
blew Angel across the empty face of the slope as if he were a
child’s rag doll, bowling him over face down. He straggled,
spitting and kicking, out of the drift of snow into which he had
been hurled, trying desperately to orient himself in the howling
whiteness, not knowing that he was screaming at the wind as if it
were some live thing attacking him.

‘
Damn you!’ he shouted. ‘Damn you,
damn you, goddamn you!’

He found that he was on his knees in the
snow, and he had lost his gloves someplace. His hands looked dirty
white against the purer whiteness of the snow. The roaring wind
surrounded him, swallowed him. He was blinded, engulfed in the
whirling surge of the powder snow laced with ice that was torn from
the face of the mountain. Somehow he got to his feet and moved.
Forward? He felt for the rise of the slope, but he could sense
nothing. His feet were like wooden blocks, his face stiff and numb,
his hands without feeling. He walked straight into a flat upright
rock, caroming off it before he had even seen it properly, gashing
his cheekbone against the jagged stone. Sobbing with relief, he
worked his way around behind the big rock, into the sheltering lee
where he was shielded from the searching wind. Up ahead of him he
sensed, rather than truly saw, the hulking dark bulk of the cabin.
He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to have to walk that far again
or go out into the murderous hail of snow and ice but he knew he
must. If he stayed here now he would die.

The wind was a familiar enemy now, and
seconds after he started moving in it he felt as if he had never
stopped. Numb, dumb, weightless, without form, he was an animal
hunting a place to cower away from the awesome fury of nature. He
had no ambition now except to survive. That alone would be
enough.

He remembered nothing more until he walked
into the pile of logs behind the cabin. His numb body registered
the impact, and he fell to his knees in the soft snow, groping his
way around the log pile until he was in the space between it and
the cabin. It was dark and warm, compared to the raging cold on the
other side. He squirmed around, barking his knuckles on the frozen
logs of the cabin wall. It didn’t matter if he made a noise. In
this wind nobody would hear a sound. He sat up, chafing his hands,
rubbing them hard against each other. Then he rubbed snow on his
half-frozen face, punishing the skin. Slowly, very slowly, he felt
the blood tingling into the deadened veins, felt the warm pulse of
life spread from his belly, felt himself coming back. He just sat
there, ice melting into water that mixed with the tears of fatigue
from his eyes, dripping from his chin. He looked at his hands. They
felt like two bunches of bananas, and something like a grin twisted
his frozen features.

He was in great shape for a fight, he
thought.

As suddenly as it had started, the blizzard
stopped. Almost immediately, the sky began to clear, and the wind
dropped away. In half an hour the sky was an astonishingly bright
cerulean blue, the way it is only in the high mountains. The
enormous presence of the serried peaks themselves now became
visible. They reared up over the pass, dazzling the eye in the
sunlight with their white covering of fresh snow. Now small animals
moved tentatively in the sparse trees, and black birds sought food
again. Their presence was strangely reassuring. The horses shifted
restlessly in the lean-to behind the cabin, stamping and snorting,
hoping for something to eat.

Angel had moved from behind the woodpile as
soon as he was able and scuttled across to the lean-to that housed
the horses. From it, he could see Falco moving about in the lighted
cabin, but he stayed in the lean-to until the warmth of the animals
revived him. In one of the saddlebags, he found some small strips
of jerky and he had chewed it with famished enjoyment, milking the
strength from the dried meat and feeling it warm him. It was still
sparklingly, bitingly cold, too cold for him to take off his
clothes and clean up his wounded back. It was stiff with clotted
blood now, and most of his left shoulder felt numb to the touch, as
though the skin had died. He could still move his arm, but it
didn’t feel right.

The dark brown smell of coffee touched his
nostrils and his mouth was instantly full of saliva. He remembered
Pat O’Connor sitting in the train, saying, ‘I could kill for
coffee!’