The storm did not so much blow as it hunted. It came at Evelyn sideways, in sheets that tore the breath out of her lungs and filled her mouth with ice, and for a moment, standing beside the truck with the door still swinging behind her, she could not see anything at all except white. The wind had erased the road, erased the cliff, erased the line between the earth and the sky, and the only solid things left were the shapes huddled against the rock face ahead of her, dark and low and still, like stones that had once been men.
She forced her legs forward. The snow was knee-deep and heavier than it looked, each step a small battle, and her boots sank and dragged and sank again. Her husband's coat was too big for her and too thin for this, but it was Henry's, and she pulled it tighter around herself as if that could count for warmth. Her heart was doing something uneven and frightening inside her ribs, a lurch and a stumble and then a hard thump that made her gasp, but she kept walking, because stopping out here would mean joining the shapes against the cliff, and she had not come all this way to do that.
The nearest man was sitting against a motorcycle that lay on its side in the snow, his head down, his arms wrapped around himself, his knees drawn up. He did not look up when she approached. Perhaps he could not hear her over the wind. Perhaps he had stopped expecting anyone to come. Evelyn stumbled the last few feet and dropped to her knees beside him, and the snow bit through her trousers at once, cold and wet against skin that was already too cold.
Hey, she said, and her voice sounded thin and ridiculous against the storm. "Hey, can you hear me?"
His head lifted slowly, as if the movement cost him everything he had left. His face was a mask of ice and beard and exhaustion. His eyes, when they found her, were not grateful. They were suspicious, narrowed, tracking her the way a cornered animal tracks a stranger, cold and calculating, as if he were deciding whether she was prey or threat or simply another hallucination the cold had invented for him. Up close, she could see what the storm had done to him and to the men around him. These were not the clean, posed bikers from a television show. These were hard men, scarred men, men whose skin carried the map of places that broke ordinary people. Prison tattoos crawled up his neck and disappeared beneath his collar. His knuckles were split and swollen, old scars layered over new ones. His lips were cracked and gray. He looked like violence that had learned to sit still.
Who the hell are you? he asked. His voice was rough, barely audible over the wind, scraped raw by cold and by shouting into a storm that did not answer.
I'm here to help, Evelyn said. She had to shout to be heard, and shouting hurt her chest, a sharp stitch that ran up under her ribs. "My truck. I came from the diner down the mountain."
Get lost, lady, he said, and he tried to make it sound like a dismissal, but there was no strength behind it, only habit, only pride holding on by its fingernails. "We don't need—"
Your friend made it to my diner, Evelyn cut in, and she leaned closer so he would not have to strain to hear her. "He told me you were dying out there. He collapsed in my parking lot, and he begged me to come. So you can either get in my truck or freeze to death proving how tough you are. Your choice."
He stared at her. For a long moment, nothing happened except the wind and the snow and the sound of her own breathing, harsh in her ears. Then, behind him, another man stirred. A head lifted from a shoulder. A hand moved, stiff and slow, brushing snow from a face. Then another man turned, and another, faces emerging from the white like swimmers breaking the surface, pale and desperate and disbelieving. They had been waiting for death, and now a sixty-four-year-old woman with a failing heart was kneeling in the snow telling them to get in her truck, and the absurdity of it seemed to hold them all still.
His jacket was stiff with ice, and beneath it his shirt was soaked through, and she could feel the cold coming off him in waves. She thought about how long they had been out here, how many hours the wind had worked on them, how the cold did not kill quickly when it wanted to be cruel. It took its time. It stole feeling first, then strength, then will, and by the time it took life, the person it took was already half gone.
Listen to me, she said, and she made her voice as steady as she could, though her teeth were chattering and her chest was aching. "My name is Evelyn Vale. I run the diner one mile down the mountain. Your friend is there right now. He's alive. He told me where you were, and he begged me to come, and I came, because I could not sit in a warm room knowing men were dying up here. I have a truck. It is not big, and it is not warm, and it will not take all of you at once. But it will take some of you, and then I will come back, and I will keep coming back until there is no one left on this mountain, or until this truck dies under me. Do you understand?"