Angel in the Road

Lane pumped his brakes gently, bringing the Jeep to a stop. As he stepped out into the snow, he grabbed for the cap the wind tried to steal from his head. Snow stung his face, clinging to his coat and jeans like white parasites. All around him, the pines bowed, their branches dripping dagger-shaped icicles. A chill of alarm inched down Lane’s spine. Although his eyes told him he was alone, the sixth sense honed by three years at war said otherwise. He could feel the presence of another human being. The screaming wind seemed to echo his disquiet. He sniffed the chill air, seeking confirmation of his suspicions, and in seconds, he had it. Beneath the smell of the snow’s cold, his own tension and the buck’s fear and pain, he smelled oil and rubber, smoking. Lane leaned across the driver’s seat of the Jeep and picked up his flashlight from the floor, then reached into the back for the rifle he had tucked beneath the stacks of supplies. The wind snatched the sound of the Jeep’s slamming door and tossed it away like an old, broken toy. Leaving the headlights on to light his way through the dusk, he approached the buck lying wounded in the road. His boots made no sound in the snow, but the animal caught his scent and twitched nervously. Still alive, poor creature. “Easy, boy,” he said, as much to himself as to the animal. Lane’s eyes absorbed the scene in an instant, as they’d been trained to do; the buck’s broken legs and heaving side; its one visible eye rolling, too confused to focus; the wild, weaving tire tracks leading from the deer to a nearby tree to the place where the road surrendered to sky. “Jesus.” No one could have survived that trip. That realization did not make him feel much easier, if at all. Nobody died in a vacuum. Everybody left somebody else behind, someone who would soon be sticking an unwelcome nose in dangerous places. The buck cried out, a cry of agony that Lane understood all too well. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot into its neck, killing it instantly. Soon it would feed other hungry creatures hiding in the hills and trees. It was the way of the wild, the way of the world. Laying the rifle across his shoulder, he stepped around the dead buck, aiming the beam of his flashlight into the tire tracks. Thank God he had come along when he had! Half an hour from now, he would not have been able to see those tracks at all, would not have been able to do what needed to be done. He had to move the body—because surely there was a body—put it where it could be readily found, so that Camp Colorado could not. Without the second thought he probably should have taken time for, he started down the cliff, stepping sideways and using his rifle butt as a pole. Although the drop was not as steep as he had first imagined, the shin-deep snow slowed him down, and the intrinsic danger took him back to another time, another thundering pulse, another hillside, another death. There had been no snow packing under his heels and in the tops of his boots then, just spongy jungle floor and leaves as big as toddlers, but it felt the same: his every muscle tensed to fight, his anxiety an explosive pressure in his chest, his wariness amplifying every sound. He shook his head, shaking away the past, and redirected his attention to the car lying upside down, its steely underside dusted in snow, its rear end lodged in a sluggish, ice-clogged stream. Even from the distance, even in the tricky early evening light, he could see the woman half out the driver’s side window, her long, dark hair spread around her head in the white snow like witch’s fingers. He did not see or smell any blood. But that did not mean there wasn’t any. Under the sound of the wind, the groaning tree limbs and his own labored breathing, he could hear the woman crying weakly. He froze, stunned to find her alive and struggling to free herself from the crushed window frame that held her tight. When he could move, he drew closer, taking note of the thick mink coat she wore, and he wondered if he knew her. Halting at the top of her head, he stabbed his rifle butt into the snow at his feet and stared down at her. “Why don’t you just shoot me, too?” she gasped.