Tough Cookie

Minutes later, winded and puffing, I was wondering if, in the dark, I had missed the turnoff to Elk Valley. Then, as I fought down panic, it suddenly appeared on the left, and stopped me in my tracks. The left-hand split to the old hiking path was completely blocked with a gigantic pile of dead trees. The sign posted on the trees saying Warning——Avalanche Area——Do Not Enter! filled me with alarm. I couldn’t climb over the pile of trees … it was eight or nine feet high. But going through the valley was the fastest way to the expansion area—and the security guard’s cabin.

To my consternation, I suddenly realized the construction road ran over Elk Ridge. For a moment, the wind ceased shuffling through the trees. Behind me, the faint huffing noise drew nearer. Jack was coming.

I whispered a prayer. Then I headed up the hill.

How far to the cabin now? Twenty minutes? I tried not to think. Just head upward. Up, up, up, no time for rest, despite the fact that my sides were screaming with pain.

Ten minutes later, the wide, shimmering expanse where Cinda had started her fatal run in Nate’s film opened up on my left. It was startlingly beautiful, like a giant’s sugar bowl, steeply tipped, frozen hard, glittering in the moonlight. And—people will never learn—running straight across the steep, concave space were the unmistakable paths of half a dozen ski tracks. At the other end of the ski tracks, set perhaps twenty feet into the pines, the lights of the security guard’s cabin glowed yellow in the shadows. I could just make out the path of the construction road. It ran across the treed top of the ridge, then curved right down to a parking lot surrounding the cabin.

I looked behind me. Jack was about a hundred feet back, running methodically, despite socks, despite ice and snow.

Think. The fastest way to the cabin was straight across the steep bowl, the way the ski tracks ran. But I could never go that way. It was too dangerous, especially after all the new snow we’d had. Still, I didn’t have time to go over the forested ridge and make it to the cabin. Even if I could run straight on the road the whole way over, Jack would come straight across and cut me off.

Stay in the trees, I decided. Above the bowl, but below the road. It’s the only safe way. Hug the shadows, stay off the moonlit side of the road. When you get near the cabin, call for help

. I ran.

At the top of the ridge, I dared another glance down. Jack had left the road and was running through the bowl, in the skiers’ tracks, about a hundred feet back. He knew where I was headed, and he intended to get there first. Worse, he was wearing shoes. He must have brought them in his ski jacket pockets, along with his pistol. The man was not going to be deterred.

Well, neither was I. “Help!” I screeched as I pelted down the center of the road. A third of a mile left. “Help! Security! Come out of the cabin! Help! On the road, above you! Help!” Despite the fact that wood smoke whipped out of the metal-pipe chimney, no face came to the window, no door opened. My heart pounded madly. Dammit! Was the guy deaf?

Jack was two-thirds of the way across the tracks. He ran as nimbly as Mercury, as Pan, as every Greek god who’d ever been known for speed. Badly winded, I continued my bumbling pace. A quarter-mile to the cabin. The wind had picked up again. There was no use yelling for someone to rescue me, because it wasn’t going to happen. I was going to die on this mountain. Just like Nate and Fiona and Doug.

Pow. Jack, only forty feet away, both hands gripping the pistol straight in front of him, had fired at me. I tried to zigzag as I ran, but each step brought me closer to him. We were both racing down the sides of a triangle; the cabin was where we would intersect.

Thirty feet from the cabin, totally out of breath, I hugged a tree and stopped, bent over and wheezing.

“You’re not going to make it, Goldy,” he called fiercely as he kept advancing toward me, aiming the gun. Fifteen feet away. He was almost to the edge of the bowl. I clung helplessly to my tree. “Good-bye!” he screamed as he fired again.

The frigid air boomed and reverberated with the explosion. I squeezed my eyes shut as terror closed my throat.