Life Expectancy

He blew twin plumes of frosted breath and sprang forward, followed at once by the rest of the herd.
        I couldn't turn back to the right sharply enough to avoid them. When I tramped the brakes perhaps too hard, the Explorer dug in, finding some traction in the blanket of dead needles and fallen cones immediately under the snow. We slowed for a moment, then encountered ice. The wheels alternately locked and stuttered as we slid toward the herd.
        The deer were beautiful, limber, graceful. They seemed to travel without quite touching hooves to ground, as though they were spirits in a dream.
        I desperately hoped to avoid them, not only because the thought of killing them sickened me but also because they weighed hundreds of pounds. Hitting one of them would devastate the Explorer no less than would driving it into a wall.
        The encounter unfolded as though the deer moved in different universes from ours, as if we were briefly visible to each other through some window between our realities. Having no substance in each other's realm, the SUV slid through the herd, and the frightened herd bounded past the SUV, and we didn't collide with any of them, although we must have missed more than one by a fraction of an inch.
        Although the deer were gone, the wheels remained locked. I could neither steer nor brake.
        The descent continued uncontrolled, a glissade over snow that had compacted into a brittle crust of dirty ice. This mantle cracked and popped under us, and our speed increased.
        I saw more deadwood in our path. A fallen tree. It had been down so long that all the foliage and most of the smaller branches had moldered away, leaving a four-foot-diameter log that would be mottled with lichen and festooned with fungus during warmer months but that was not ornamented now, nestled into the forest loam.
        Lorrie must have seen it, too, but did not cry out, only braced herself.
        We struck the log. The impact did the Explorer no good, but didn't rack it up as bad as I expected, either. We were lifted from our seats, tested the safety harnesses, but with less violence than we had experienced when we plowed into the snowdrift on the highway.
        The fallen tree had been hollowed out by worms and beetles and decomposition. It was largely a shell, and what wood remained under the bark was rotten.
        The collision didn't turn the Explorer to junk, merely slowed it down.
        Sheets of bark and cambium wrapped the front axle, snared throughout the undercarriage, causing friction, slowing us further.
        We began to turn as we descended. The wheel spun through my hands, useless. Then we were proceeding backward, headlights aimed upslope, gliding blindly into the ravine, the very fate that had terrified me when the Hummer had been pushing us toward the brink.
        Unfortunately, we didn't slide far enough to build speed again. The left rear bumper clipped a tree. We ricocheted sideways into a flanking tree, and then the back of the Explorer wedged between the two. We were at a full stop.
        "Well done," Lorrie said dryly.
        "You okay?"
        "Pregnant."
        "Contractions?"
        "Tolerable."
        "Still irregular?"
        She nodded. "Thank God."
        I switched off the headlights. The trail we had left would be easy to follow, but I saw no point in helping our mysterious assailant find us sooner.
        Here under the canopy of evergreens, the darkness pooled deep. Although we had descended perhaps four hundred yards, it seemed that we must be thousands of fathoms from the highway and even farther from any hope of surfacing to the sight of the sky again.
        Although I couldn't smell gasoline and had to conclude that neither the tank nor the fuel lines had sustained damage, and though keeping the car as warm as possible had to be a priority, I switched off the engine. Without our headlights to guide him, the gunman might have tried to track us by the engine noise.
        I wanted him to be forced to use a light of his own and thereby reveal his position as he descended.
        He would have to come on foot. If he drove down, even the Hummer wouldn't reliably climb back up such a slope, not in the thinner air of this altitude. He wouldn't risk it.
        I said, "Lock the doors after me."
        "Where you going?"
        "Surprise him."
        "No. Let's run."
        "You can't."
        She