Blood Runs Cold Read Free Page B

it moved, gaining the momentum to bury everything in its path, a deafening blast in the tranquil afternoon.
    For seconds that felt longer, Mike was flying in an exhilarating powdered-snow rush. He was a snowboarder, busting a huge air, applause drowning out his proud cries. But somewhere inside, his instinct kicked in and he started to swim.
    Bob felt like a rug had been pulled from under his feet, a rug he had been very happy with, the type that had protected him from the cold concrete underneath.
    Lasco had descended barely four feet from the corpse when it was dislodged, hitting him hard in the back, forcing the wind from his lungs, sending them both plunging toward the ridge below.
    Sonny became a centerpiece to the erupting snow, the height of its power, quickly descending to its crushing, savage depth.
    In ten seconds, it was over. The snow had settled – twenty feet deep at the toe of the slide. Minutes passed before its powdery shower lifted, leaving in its wake a desolate white vacuum.

4
    Mike Delaney knew that he wasn’t driving this motion, he was at the mercy of it. There was no skill to the rotations of his body. The sound he was hearing was the avalanche’s freight-train roar. If there was an audience that wasn’t being swept up and deposited all around him, they would have seen a spectacular final display … but would have turned away for the crash landing that was strangely void of sound.
    A waitress kept trying to serve Sonny Bryant cocktails. His hand shook as he took each one and dropped it to the ground.
    ‘What is your problem?’ she kept saying.
    ‘You don’t get it. I’m freezing,’ he kept answering, again reaching out a shaking hand. ‘I’m freezing. Is this hot?’ He dropped the glass again.
    ‘What is your problem?’
    He jerked awake. ‘I’m freezing .’
    With the exception of one gloved hand, Sonny Bryant lay completely buried.
    Denis Lasco was on his back, pinned beneath his charge, the pair taking the shape of a skewed cross on the snow. The corpse’s vitreous mask had cracked open, leaving a pale cheek an inch from Lasco’s lips. As he breathed frigid air through his nose, a slim strand of her hair was sucked against his nostrils. Lasco’s head shook violently, struggling to exhale it away. But the rise of his chest was restricted. In his panic, his neck muscles went rigid, supporting him long enough to observe a contributory factor to the woman’s death; a massive exit wound. A mash-up mix of reds and blacks had been ripped through the back of her snowsuit. It was the last thing Lasco saw before his breath exploded out of him and the picture went black.
    When he was fourteen years old, Bob Gage had to dissect a cow’s eyeball in biology class. He remembered how it flinched under his scalpel, how he fought to secure it, finally piercing what he expected would be soft, yielding flesh. But it crunched as the blade hit its center. What the butcher had given him was a frozen eyeball. And it had turned Bob’s stomach more than cutting into the flesh of something that could have oozed.
    Bob now stared at the heavy white world that surrounded him, possessed by the icy cold of his eyeballs, no less sickening now than a thirty-year-old memory. He knew nobody would be dissecting his eyeballs if he didn’t make it out of this, but he knew a sharp blade would be coming into his dead world and it was more than he could take. You can’t scream from the top of your lungs when they’re searching for oxygen that isn’t there. But Sheriff Bob Gage gave it his best shot.
    For the second time that afternoon, an all-call went out and pagers across Summit County beeped, one of them under the snow of Quandary Peak. Twenty volunteers were called to a scene most of them were already at. The ones who hadn’t made it first time around were paged again and told why, this time, they might want to show up.
    Bob could see something blue sticking out of the snow. He turned on his side and rolled