The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“Transport truck’s gone off the road,” Johnny said behind the counter, and crimped a new coffee filter into the brew basket. A few hairs pulled loose from his straight black ponytail and drifted into his face; he brushed them back with a callused brown hand. “The boys went to haul it to Fiddler’s.”

Georgie Fiddler ran one of the two service stations in town. Mike Blondin, who ran the other, was still at his table, hands wrapped thin around a chipped blue pottery mug. He held it up and Cora grabbed the stained coffeepot.

“I want the fresh stuff,” he complained; she didn’t answer, just filled the mug with sour, black coffee. He waved her off before it hit the brim and flipped open the dented metal sugar tin.

“You didn’t go out with them,” she said. Not a question.

Mike Blondin’s fingers moved like a stonecarver’s, measured sugar with chisel precision: one pinch, two. He had big hands. “Wouldn’t want to just abandon you,” he grinned. There’d been a time, not too many years past, when Mikey Blondin’s grin had got him whatsoever he desired anywhere from Sunrise to the Alberta border.

“Thoughtful,” she said, dry, just as Johnny Red hit the percolator button and called out, “What’m I, chopped liver?” Gertie Myers, back at the corner table, rolled her eyes. Cora ignored it all and covered the cooling plates.

An hour passed before the menfolk trickled back in, red-faced and damp with winter-sweat. “Hey,” Johnny Red said, and ladled out eight bowls of steaming chicken soup. “What’s the news?”

“Went hard into the ditch,” Fred Tutcho replied, and sucked back soup straight from the bowl. The steam set the ice in his eyelashes to melting. “Georgie got the tow and we managed to fish it out, but the front axle’s pretty busted.”

“The driver?” Cora asked.

“Got him up at Jane’s.” Jane Hooker ran the Treeline Motel, which was ten rooms and a Dene crafts shop, old-style porcupine quill-and-hair work, out by Blondin’s. In the deep wintertime most of her rooms were closed; the only visitors to Sunrise in January were family and the odd long-haul trucker. “She’n Georgie are checking him out.”

“I’ll bring them something, then,” Cora said, and ducked into the kitchen. She filled three thermoses and screwed the lids on tight, shrugged on her long, thick, battered coat. She wound three scarves and a hat about her head before stepping out into the storm.

It wasn’t enough. The storm cut. It had blown in from the north, where there weren’t no buildings or shrubs — whitebark pines or larches — to beat down the wind. Even breathing through thick wool, Cora’s nostrils froze together at the first sucked-in breath, and her jeans were stiff by the time she reached the Treeline Motel. There was only one light on. Cora hunkered deeper into her scarves and scooted, knees-bent against the slippery gravel, down the battered row of doors with fingers clamped around her canvas bag.

Room six had been converted into a warm and stuffy sickroom. Jane Hooker leaned over the bed, obscuring her patient from the knees on up, and Georgie Fiddler tinkered with the steam radiator, coaxing out a whining, clanking heat. The warm air made Cora sneeze, and two heads turned sharp around the double bed. She waggled the canvas bag and groped with her free hand for a tissue.

Her fingers were still stiff when she unscrewed the thermos caps and set them on the nightstand. Jane shifted over to make room, and she finally got a look at the driver.

He had soft, sweaty, messy hair. It fell dark across a white man’s flattened cheekbones and was tamped down in a line where his cap would sit. The cap was on the dresser: white and faded red, damp from the roadside snow. The brim was bent almost double, into a fist.

Jane had the man’s jackets off — one for winter and a checked old lumber jacket — and her broad hand felt the shape of his ribs. “Good enough,” she said to Georgie with a nod, and he let out a little sigh; probably happy he didn’t have to call to Hay River for the doctor.

Cora poured them half-chilled chicken soup and passed the mugs into reddened hands. “From Johnny,” she said. Jane took hers with a nod, distracted; Georgie caught his up and resumed his regular pacing. She cupped her hands around a third mug, stealing what heat it had left, and leaned back against the wall to watch.

“Enough left for our boy here?” Jane asked, and Cora nodded. She’d ladled Johnny’s soup pot dry. “Good,” Jane replied, and stood with a long, loose breath. The lines around her eyes were windburned and deep. “I get the feeling he’ll wake up hungry. Got a pretty good crack on the head.”

“Lucky he didn’t break those ribs too,” Georgie said.

“Speaking of.” Jane paused. “You find his seatbelt on?”

“He was clear across the cab.” Georgie looked up at her, at Jane, and his brow creased into three fine canyons over his greying eyebrows. “I’ll look over the truck tomorrow.”

Jane nodded. “You’re a good man, George Fiddler.”