Unexpectedly, another flashlight beam sliced across their route to Gretel.
“What the f…,” Andy wheezed, surveying the gruesome scene. Dark—he assumed red—rivers were flowing out of both bodies. The broken neck of a bottle stuck out of one of Gretel’s eye sockets twisting her into some rabid, R-rated cartoon character. A sickening concoction of shock and revulsion welled inside him, but loathing for the perpetrator kept it down. He stood still, to grip himself. Out the corner of his eye he saw Paul running to check the other body, whoever the fuck the murdering bastard was, probably a poacher. To Andy, he deserved whatever he got.
Andy lurched over to Gretel. Dribbles of her bile slobbered into the puddle under her pitiful head. Her good eye was almost opaque, the once luminous yellow-green had doused itself.
Gretel was gone. There wasn’t even a squiggle showing on his monitor; not even a misty puff of air from her lips.
Paul shouted, but Andy didn’t hear what he was saying.
“Andy, it’s some woman.”
Andy glimpsed over to see him rolling her onto her back, unzipping the top of her parka and feeling her neck for a pulse.
The loathing smouldered within Andy as he dropped, helpless, to his knees beside Gretel. Instinctively, he knew who the wolf-killer had to be.
What had that bitch fucking done? He removed his glove and stroked his wolf. The only trace of warmth left on her frosty fur was from his touch. His anger welled and he gripped his hand into a fist and pounded it at the melt beside Gretel, but smashed it against a thinly disguised rock. Absently and without a sound, Andy lifted his hand and stared as his own blood dripped out of his glove and mingled with Gretel’s.
“Andy, get over here,” screamed Paul. “Now!”
63
RUMBLING DOWN TO Manifold on the back of the flat-top, Paul moulded himself around Isabel like a hotdog bun, his arms and legs wrapped to radiate his body heat into the frozen woman. He and Andy, mostly he, had cleaned and patched her wounds and removed her wet clothes, replacing them with the dry gear they’d found in her backpack. Her space blanket as well as Andy’s, and his crusty back shelf rug and sleeping bag were now swaddling the two of them, keeping the chill out from the air and the metal truck tray they were lying on. They’d left both the snowmobile and the ATV at Lambert’s Crossing. Andy, a trained paramedic as well as a ranger, should have been the one to hop up on the back and care for Isabel but when Paul saw the rage steaming out of his friend’s nostrils, he didn’t even suggest it.
Andy drove with the two very premature wolf cubs coddled inside a blanket on the seat next to him. With his tears streaming, he’d sliced Gretel open to save her litter. There’d been five, but three were already gone.
When they got into phone signal range, Andy radioed ahead to alert the doctors at the county ER to scrub up for an emergency.
“Injuries…? Age…? Sex…? Name…?” grilled Emily, the triage nurse who took the call. Andy had dated her a few times.
“It’s the Speaker of the House, orright? Go fuckin’ Google her!”
Paul hugged Isabel close to him. Initially, he confused her shivering with the rough terrain Andy was bouncing the truck over and he called out to get Andy to slow down. But, once he realised, he worked harder at stroking warmth into her. Before they took off, Andy had explained she was probably in hypothermic shock, so Paul needed to get her warm and keep talking to her, pushing her to respond, to stay conscious. Paul spoke to her about everything and nothing, at least he tried, but his voice came out in fits and starts: whenever the truck would dip into a ditch or bounce off a rock, it would throw the huddled pair, and his words, off-balance.
“… so T-Taylor had a heart attack and po-popped it. It was while he w-a-as reading Dr Seu-Seuss to some s-school kids. C-can you believe th-that?” Paul asked, not expecting an answer.
Isabel coughed for the first time and, against his cheek, he felt an eyelash struggle to open. She whispered something Paul couldn’t make out over the bumps and rolls. “Wha-a-at?” he asked.
She tried again. “Too l-late.” Her hand, limp, did its best to imitate a fist against his shoulder blade.
Paul misunderstood. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” Shit, he thought; she could’ve been President of the United States and here she was, thinking she was dying in his arms… Maybe she was, he shivered, but it wasn’t just from the cold.
“T-too late,” she repeated as her eye closed.