Life Expectancy

looked stricken. "This blows."
        My reassuring smile must have been ghastly. "Gotta go."
        "Love you."
        "More than mung-bean custard," I said.
        As I climbed out, the ceiling light was a minor betrayal, quickly extinguished when I closed the driver's door as quietly as possible..
        Lorrie reached to the console and pressed the master-lock button among the power controls.
        I took a moment to assure myself that the trees blocked the Explorer from further descent. Neither rear door could be opened. The SUV would not slip loose and roll backward.
        The darkness seemed to be more than just an absence of light, seemed to have a texture, as though billions of sooty spoors were sifting out of the trees. The humidity, the cold, and most of all my fear conspired to invest this particular darkness with a special substance.
        Holding my breath, I listened but heard only the clicks and creaks of the Explorer cooling in the bitter air and the solemn wind lamenting in the highest reaches of the trees. Nothing that suggested an approaching enemy.
        The rifleman might still be standing far above us, on the shoulder of Hawksbill Road, mulling over his next move. I suspected, however, that he was a guy who acted quickly and wouldn't spend much time brooding about alternatives.
        I didn't waste time wondering who he was, rummaging my mind for explanations. If he killed me, I'd never know. If I got the better of him, I'd have answers. In either case, speculation was fruitless.
        Leaving Lorrie alone in the locked car felt like abandonment, although without leaving her, I could not hope to save her and our baby.
        Gradually my eyes became dark-adapted, but I couldn't wait for full night vision.
        I eased around the trunk of one of the trees between which we had become lodged, and moved to the back of the Explorer.
        The forest floor laid clever traps. A crust of hardened snow gave me less trouble than the detritus scattered across it: masses of slippery dead fir needles and cones that rolled treacherously underfoot.
        From the rifleman's perspective at the top of the incline, the landscape down here had no profile; the dynamic forest congealed into a black murk. I knew he could not see me as I moved south across the slope, but I nonetheless vividly imagined the crosshairs of a sniper scope scoring my face as he lined up a head shot.
        The snow cover wasn't uniform in these sheltered depths, two or three inches in some places, a foot in others, with numerous patches of bare ground. As my night vision improved, I saw the rising land as a crazy quilt of vaguely luminous white swatches stitched in a random pattern with scraps of dark fabric.
        I quickly learned how to move more stealthily, but the nature of the terrain made silent progress impossible.
        Every few steps, I stopped and listened for any indication that our attacker might be descending. I heard nothing other than the soughing of wind in the highest needled boughs and a menacing-almost subliminal-low droning that seemed to arise from the earth itself but that must have been an echo of the wind.
        When I had gone about forty feet, I turned east and began to climb parallel to the tracks we had left in our plunge. I stayed low to the ground, grabbing at rock formations, exposed roots, and other handholds to steady myself, ascending in monkey fashion though not with monkey agility.
        I hoped to get half or two thirds of the way up the slope before spotting the rifleman on the way down. Then I could lie low, wait for him to pass, move north across the slope, and attempt to creep up behind him.
        This plan was fully insane. I wasn't James Bond. Or even Maxwell Smart. As a man of action, I preferred kneading dough to knocking heads, mixers to submachine guns.
        Unable to conceive of an alternative that might be any less insane, I continued climbing, feeling more like a monkey the higher I went.
        My hands grew cold. The unlined gloves in one of the parka pockets would provide a small measure of warmth, but they would also interfere with my sense of touch and the flexibility of my grip. I preferred to bring my hands to my mouth and warm them with my breath.
        Worse than chilled hands, my left leg began to ache, throbbing like the root of an abscessed tooth. In warmer weather, I'm never aware that surgical steel