Hey. Evelyn shook his shoulder, and the movement felt strangely intimate for a stranger, her gloved hand against frozen leather, the snow pressing cold through her knees. Nothing. No flinch, no groan, no sign that her voice had reached him through the layers of cold and exhaustion. "Hey. You need to get inside." She said it louder this time, leaning close, her breath making a brief, useless cloud that the wind tore away at once. For a moment she thought she had failed, that she had come out into this storm only to kneel beside a man who was already gone, and the thought settled on her with a weight that was almost familiar. Then his eyes opened.
They were pale gray, nearly colorless, focused on nothing at first, drifting across the snow and the dark sky as if he were looking for something he had lost. When they found her face, they sharpened a fraction, and Evelyn saw in them a flicker of the man he must have been when he was not freezing to death in a parking lot. He tried to speak, and the sound that came out was shredded, broken by cold and by something worse, something that sounded like it had been scraped raw from the inside. "My brothers," he whispered. "My brothers are dying out there."
What? Evelyn leaned closer, her ear nearly to his frozen bandana, the wind roaring so loudly she was afraid she had imagined the words. "What did you say?"
Mountain pass. He tried to sit up and failed, his arms giving way beneath him, his body sinking back into the snow with a soft, terrible heaviness. "Forty-nine men, storm hit, can't get through. No shelter, no signal." The numbers landed on her one by one, each heavier than the last. Forty-nine. Not a handful. Not a small group that might be tucked into a truck and driven to safety in a single trip. Forty-nine men, trapped somewhere in the mountains, with no shelter and no way to call for help, while the temperature fell and the wind kept coming. His hand grabbed her wrist with surprising strength, fingers like frozen steel closing around her, and Evelyn gasped, not from pain but from the sudden, desperate force of it. "Please, they're dying."
Evelyn stared at him. Forty-nine men. She thought about the mountain passes around Black Hollow, the way Highway 87 climbed into the Rockies with nothing but cliff on one side and a thousand-foot drop on the other, a road that was beautiful in summer and merciless in winter. She had driven it herself in better weather, and even then she had kept her eyes forward and her hands tight on the wheel, because the drop did not forgive a mistake. Now she imagined that road buried in snow, imagined motorcycles lined along a shoulder that no longer existed, imagined men sitting against a cliff face with the wind cutting through leather that had never been made for this kind of cold. She thought about how the temperature was already fifteen below zero and falling, and how fifteen below was not a number but a sentence, a slow closing of the body's doors, fingers first, then toes, then judgment, then breath.
Where? she asked, and her voice sounded steadier than she felt, which surprised her. She had expected panic. Instead there was a strange, practical clarity, as if some older part of her, the part that had run a diner through lean winters and buried a husband and a son, had stepped forward and taken over. "Where are they? Tell me where."
Mile marker 63, Eagle's Ridge Pass. The words came out in pieces, each one costing him something. His eyes started to close, the pale gray disappearing behind lids crusted with ice, and Evelyn shook his shoulder again, gently this time, afraid of hurting him and more afraid of losing him. "Stay with me. Hey. Stay with me."
Sheriff won't help us. The sentence was almost too quiet to hear, but it cut through the wind more sharply than anything else he had said. "Said let us freeze." Of course he did. Sheriff Braden Cole had been trying to push the Iron Vultures out of Wyoming for five years. He called them criminals and thugs and worse, and he had told Evelyn once, standing right at her counter with a coffee mug in his hand, that the only good biker was a dead one. She had refilled his cup and said nothing, because that was what women in dying diners did when the sheriff talked, but she had remembered the sentence, and she remembered it now, standing in a blizzard with a dying man's hand around her wrist. Now forty-nine of them were dying in the mountains, and he had decided to let it happen, as if a badge gave a man the right to decide which lives were worth a rescue and which were not.
She thought about the sheriff again, because the sheriff was the reason this man had ridden through a blizzard alone, and the reason forty-nine other men were now waiting to die. Braden Cole had been sheriff for years, and in all that time he had made the Iron Vultures his personal campaign, speaking about them at town meetings as if they were an invading army rather than men who rode a highway and stopped for coffee and, sometimes, caused trouble the way any large group of hard men could cause trouble. Evelyn had heard the stories, and she had also seen the men themselves, over the years, stopping at her diner in small groups, ordering pie, paying cash, leaving tips that were larger than her regulars ever left. They had never frightened her in her own diner. They had frightened her only in the stories other people told about them, and she had begun, in the last few years, to distrust stories that made it easy to stop seeing people as people.