29

SOMETHING SO SIMPLE as tying someone up is no easy matter at fifty below. Fisher could have warned them about that. The duct tape’s been lying in the back of the second guy’s pickup and the glue’s frozen, and when he does manage to pull off a length he can’t get it to stick around Fisher’s wrists. They’ve got him facing the pipeline—a steel tube thicker than the trunk of any tree in the Interior, coming crooked as a bendy straw down the hill into the valley then vanishing up over the next rise on steel legs like saw horses. A viewpoint for tourists. Busloads of them are brought here in the summer. Christ, thinks Fisher, might as well go and view the power plant. At least it has lights.

There’s a warning sign on the pipeline, bristly with frost. Don’t climb onto the pipeline. Don’t fire your gun at the pipeline. What to do in case of flames coming out of the pipeline. It takes his mind off the cold, at least, because his kidnappers have taken off his gloves, and they’ve been fucking around for so long with the duct tape that his hands have gone numb from the fingertips down to where his fingers meet his palms. A throbbing starts up in his left thumb then slowly fades, erased by the cold. The first guy’s smoking now and his cigarette looks obscene sticking from his mouth in the middle of that ski mask. As for the second guy, he’s still struggling with the tape. “Hundred and one freaking uses,” he mutters, “except to tie a guy up. Should write and fucking complain.”

The first guy’s passing his gun from hand to hand. He huffs between his teeth and his breath spills out in great wobbling clouds toward whichever hand he has free. His gloves aren’t thick enough, and you just try holding a piece of metal while it’s burning your hand with cold. He draws hard on his cigarette as though that’s going to warm him, and the smoke billows around Fisher. He turns his head—not so you’d notice really, he thinks—but the guy steps closer and breathes the smoke straight into his face, those cut-out eyes staring right at him.

The second guy says, “That’ll have to fucking do. I’m not gonna spend all day on this shit,” and he tosses the roll of tape back into the truck.

“How about his eyes, man?”

“Give him your mask.”

“Fuck no! Use the goddamn tape.”

“It’s shit in this cold. Give him your mask and pull it down.”

“It has freaking eyeholes.”

“Backwards, you moron.”

The first guy snaps at Fisher in his tight voice, “Shut your eyes,” and he does. The guy’s rough. He wrenches the mask down, but with his gloves on he can’t get a proper hold and it bunches up over Fisher’s eyes. The guy paws at Fisher’s head, knocking the soft lump where the woman hit him a lifetime ago, trying to pull the mask all the way down without taking off his gloves. He puffs under his breath as he tries again, jerking Fisher’s head to the side, and a second time, and that’s when Fisher lets his eyes open for an instant. By a miracle the guy doesn’t see, he’s so intent on the mask. Then it comes down over Fisher’s face, and his chest tightens as though he’s been hit. Not because of the second-hand warmth, or the stink of greasy skin and tobacco. No, because of what he’s just seen, a strange face, blank as an egg. No hair, no eyebrows, the skull rounded and gleaming and bare as a knee, the eye-sockets scarcely more than a slight dent in the flesh. The sight of that egg face leaves him with a sick feeling of fear.

Behind the mask he opens his eyes. Blackness patterned with tiny lozenges of light, everything blurred. He tilts his head to where he thinks that monstrous face was, tries to make it out through the weave of the mask, but the guys are moving about, their boots squeaking over the snow, and besides, it’s all just dizzying speckles of brightness against the dark. He shuts his eyes again. Is this what it’s like to be a worm, he wonders, living in darkness as though that’s all there is? A tube of blind flesh exposed to all kinds of dangers it can’t see?

A roaring from the highway, a car storming down the hill toward them, the noise of its engine fractured in the cold air. Fisher leans forward as though the sound’s reeling him in, but an arm falls across his chest like a bar. The second guy says, “Don’t get any ideas.” Then he calls out, “Open the truck door so we can get him in.”

Mr Egg Face, the guy with the tight voice, must be standing a few yards away now. He shouts back, “Fuck no—put him in the backseat of the cab.”

“We’re ditching it.”

A crunch and squeak of snow. The second guy’s voice is louder now. “How big a fuckwit are you? Weren’t you listening? We keep a low profile.”

“You’re the one wanted him to drive it out here.”

“And you’re gonna drive it up to—fuck it, the rest of the way. OK? Then we can ditch it.”

“Your fucking idea, you drive it.”

“If you don’t like it, you should have brought your own goddamn truck.” There’s the crunch of boots on snow, the groan of a door being opened. “Get on with it, we’re already late and the Commander’s not gonna like it. Just don’t go and fucking wreck it.” A door slams. The tone of the truck’s engine swoops upward and suddenly the air stinks of exhaust.

Mr Egg Face isn’t pleased. He grabs Fisher by the back of his parka and yanks him nearly off his feet. Off they stumble, off to where the cab waits, then Fisher’s shoved inside. His face slides against the seat. Even through the ski mask it feels cold. He shifts his head so that the sore lump is cooled by it. Lying like this, he opens his eyes and makes out a square of bright sky that flickers as the cab lurches off along the road. He remembers a Hitchcock film where some guy tries to remember the sounds he heard as he was driven around blindfolded, but there’s nothing to hear except the engine. He thinks he should try to work out the route by the turns the cab takes—isn’t that what a clever man would do?—but although he knows this road, each curve and climb and dip, all the way out to the small settlement of Beecher, he’s lost within minutes.

It doesn’t help that the guy’s driving the cab so hard the engine whines and the turns are too tight. Every once in a while he shouts out, “Any trouble and you’re a dead man—get it?” and, “Stay down or you’ll get one between the eyes.” So Fisher stays down and twists at the tape binding his hands. He forces his hands apart until the tape stretches a little and its glue pulls at the hair on his wrists. Fuck, he thinks, tied up twice in one day—what are the chances of that? Only the duct tape’s tougher to escape from. He tugs and tugs, feels the bite of it into his flesh, the way it sticks as he tries to pull one hand free, works at it so hard it rubs his skin until it smarts. But he keeps trying. He imagines himself wrenching open the door and jumping for it. He pictures how he’d fall, and the crush of his bones against the road. He thinks how, if he’s a goddamn lucky sunuvabitch, someone will see him and pull over, and Mr Egg Face will just have to let him be saved. He can almost taste it: the sweetness of relief, of safety.

And Bree? The thought of her makes him breathe too fast, makes his face sweat beneath the mask. He’s so damn scared he’s going to save himself, when the whole idea was to find her and get her away from these guys? Isn’t getting caught what he wanted? Isn’t this a lead to where she might be? He forces himself to lie still, letting the cab rock him, tilting him forward a little as it brakes, pushing him back against the seat as it turns off the highway and onto a lumpy side road.

One thing’s clear: they’re out in the wilderburbs where houses and cabins are half-hidden in the trees, and where you can fire off a gun as many times as you want and no one’s going to pay it any mind.