Snowblind
They come at night. Forward. A stranger staggers out of the wilderness under the cover of a blizzard and stumbles into a diner full of people. He collapses in the entryway, unzips his jacket, and allows the object hidden inside to fall out. Screaming commences. Down. Four old college buddies embark upon their annual elk hunting trip into the Rocky Mountains. This promises to be their last, for the passage of time is as merciless and unpredictable as the Colorado weather. And they're not alone. Help. There are other hunters in the mountains, stalking game of a different breed. They know exactly what they're doing, because they've been hunting in these woods for a long, long time. And no one ever survives to betray their existence.
November 21st: Pine Springs, Colorado
Today
The man staggers through knee-deep snow, buffeted by the furious wind and a battery of ceaseless snowflakes. He can no longer feel his feet, which snag on buried vegetation and slip on hidden rocks. He falls, but manages to push himself upright with the knowledge that the next time he falls might be the last. His hands ache from the bitter cold and frostbite has already begun to erode the flesh on his nose and cheeks. The blood from his chapped lips has frozen to his teeth, and despite the snow that blows into his open mouth, his throat is bone-dry. His beard is white with ice and so many crystals have crusted in his eyelashes that he can no longer force them closed. His vision is burned red, save for the myriad white shapes that race past him, making the ground seem to tilt and the buried pine trees lean.
He repeats three words over and over in his mind.
They are the only conscious thoughts he’s capable of forming, the residue of the plan he formed when he set out. He had known at the time that it really wasn’t much of a plan, but its simplicity was what had allowed him to survive beyond the point when his faculties abandoned him. As long as he continued to move forward and follow the mountainous topography ever downward, he would eventually find a cabin or a town or someplace where he would be able to find help. And they would definitely help him…especially when he showed them what he had tucked under his jacket, against his chest.
They would have to believe him then.
He is on his face in the snow before he realizes he’s going to fall. He coughs out a mouthful of snow and pushes himself up to all fours-
— only to find the world black again. He can’t breathe. He panics and pushes himself up again on trembling arms. It takes all of his strength to rise to his knees so that he can claw the snow out of his eyes and mouth.
A light.
A distant golden aura through the shifting branches and blowing flakes.
He bellows in triumph. It is an animal sound that summons a warm trickle of blood from his trachea.
He manages to create momentum and wills his legs to carry him onward.
The light grows brighter and brighter until he bursts from the thicket and stumbles into the tire ruts on an icy road. There are silhouettes in the light, vague outlines that he recognizes only as help.
He doesn’t recognize the words painted on the plate glass window or the tables at which he and his friends had dined only five days prior, in a purple vinyl booth beneath mounted jackalope heads and framed yellow newspaper clippings featuring colorful local stories about notorious cannibals like Alferd Packer and George Donner and various Bigfoot hoaxes. He doesn’t comprehend the startled expressions on the faces of the patrons who witness his approach. He is focused solely on the door and somehow making his useless hand open it.
The warmth assaults him. The intensity of the light blinds him.
Shadows race toward him. He hears the clatter of plates and the thunder of footsteps on his way down. Voices everywhere-loud, penetrating-but he doesn’t understand the words.
He is left with
He opens his jacket and his proof falls to the floor with a thud.
There is a long moment of silence.
And then the screaming begins.
November 18th: Mt. Isolation
Three Days Ago
“Help me get him in here!” Will Coburn shouted to be heard over the shrieking wind. “Hang on. Let me brace the door.”
Joel Vigil groaned in agony.
“Would you just hold still?” Blaine Shore said. He was struggling to maintain his grasp on Vigil’s legs. “You’re just going to make it worse.”
“Cut him some slack,” Todd Baumann said. “It’s not his fault.”
The blizzard had descended from out of nowhere. One minute they were skulking through the forest under a cold gray sky, following elk sign that couldn’t have been more than a few hours old, and the next they were struggling to shield their eyes from snowflakes the size of moths hurled into their faces by thirty-mile-an-hour gusts. The forecast had called for scattered flurries in the high country all weekend, but the meteorologists had been wrong. As usual. Granted, the weather in the Colorado Rockies was the definition of unpredictability, but how any of these jokers kept their jobs was beyond him. Coburn only wished he had a job like that. As an orthopedic surgeon, if he guessed wrong, he got sued. And often even when he didn’t.
“Lower him down right here,” Coburn said. “Gently. Gently. Try to keep that leg as straight as possible.”
He lowered Vigil’s torso to the snow-dusted dirt floor in a gap between broken gray boards that had been planed before his grandparents were born.
“You should be the one holding his leg,” Shore said. “I can feel the bones shifting around under there-”
Vigil moaned.
“You have the light end,” Baumann said. “I’ve got all the weight balanced under his…there.”
They slid their arms out from beneath Vigil, who bared his teeth and clenched his eyes against the pain. He must have slipped on a rock on the steep escarpment. He had been right behind them on the path one second and crashing through the scrub down the hillside the next. They had followed his cries through the blizzard until they found him at the bottom of the ravine, his right leg crumpled beneath him, his left shoulder balanced on a chunk of ice on the frozen creek, while the water spilled out underneath his head. It was below freezing and he was wet, but the more immediate concern was that the sharp edges of the broken bones could slice his femoral or tibial arteries and flood his leg with blood. They’d been lucky to stumble upon this old homestead beneath the storm.
Coburn pulled his Model 70 °CDL DM bolt-action Remington rifle over his head and tossed it to the ground.
“Shore…hand me your knife.”
Coburn crawled toward Vigil’s legs. The right boot was pointing awkwardly to the side.
“My knife? Why do you have to use my…? You aren’t going to attempt to perform surgery on him out here-”
“Just give me your damn knife!”
Coburn slipped off his gloves and held out his right hand. Shore slid the hunting knife from its scabbard and slapped the hilt into Coburn’s palm.
“Thank you,” Coburn said, and proceeded to cut Vigil’s jeans from the top of his boots to his groin. He did the same thing to the thermal underwear beneath, then carefully removed the boot and finished the job on the clothing.
“Jesus,” Baumann whispered.
Vigil’s leg was a reddish-purple and black mess of bruises, but there was no indication of pooling blood, or hypostasis. Coburn checked the strength of the pulse in Vigil’s foot and breathed an audible sigh of relief. They hadn’t clipped an artery. There was visible deformity, both superior and inferior to the knee joint itself, suggesting fractures to the distal femur and both the proximal tibia and fibula. He was going to have to reduce the breaks and run the risk of a whole list of potential complications as long as his arm, but doing so would only buy them so much time.
They needed to get Vigil off of this mountain, and they needed to do so right now.
“I know we’ve been doing this since we were undergrads,” Shore said, “but I think this is going to be my last year. The wife’s gone vegan and started pressing me about having a kid. And if I play my cards right, I just might make partner-”
“Why don’t you see if you can start a fire?” Coburn interrupted. “We need to get Vigil warmed up in a hurry.”
“How come I have to be the one to start a fire? I-” Vigil cried out when Coburn cautiously applied traction and inverted his foot. “I’ll round up some wood.”
Shore shed his.300 Win Mag and scampered over a snow-covered pile of wood that had once been part of the roof before the branches of the pines grew through.
“Kind of makes our ‘no cell phones’ rule seem kind of stupid now, doesn’t it?” Baumann said. He had paled considerably and couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of the lump where Vigil’s patella now sat, nowhere near where it should have been.
“We’d never get a signal up here anyway, especially with this storm. Besides, we can use the radio back at the camp.”
“If we can still find the camp…”
Coburn had no response.
Vigil’s teeth started to chatter. He mumbled something unintelligible. The skin on his face had taken on a waxy cast and beads of sweat were blossoming from his forehead.
“I need you to get some things for me,” Coburn said. “I need two lengths of wood, roughly thirty inches long and four inches wide. Are you with me, Todd?” He waited for Baumann to raise his eyes from Vigil’s leg. “I need one of the elk drag harnesses. And give me your flask.”
Baumann pulled the silver flask of whiskey from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to Coburn, then began rummaging through the heaps of rotting wood.
Coburn spun off the cap and tipped the flask to Vigil’s lips.
“Drink this, Joel.” Vigil sputtered and coughed, but managed to swallow most of it. “You’re going to be all right.”
“What…?” Vigil gasped. “What are you…?”
“Shh. Shh.” Coburn scanned the ground around him until he found a stick about the width of this thumb. “Just try to relax. This is what I do for a living.”
“Hang on-”
“Bite down on this,” Coburn said, and pressed the stick sideways into Vigil’s mouth, between his teeth.
He gripped Vigil’s leg beneath the fracture line, then pulled down and twisted at the same time.
Vigil’s cry echoed in the confines and shivered snow loose from the gaps in the roof.
* * *
Vigil had mercifully passed out while Coburn applied the makeshift splint, which was a stop-gap measure at best. They needed to get Vigil to a hospital sooner than later, the storm be damned. One of them was going to have to brave the blizzard and hike back to the camp to call for help…and hope that an emergency vehicle would be able to reach them in time. If they had to wait out the storm in order to get a chopper up there…
At least Shore had managed to get a decent fire going. If nothing else, Vigil seemed to be resting comfortably, and Coburn was grateful for the heat. He hadn’t realized just how damp his clothing had become or how cold he was beneath it. The light was a blessing, too. The ramshackle homestead was larger, although much the worse for wear, than he had initially thought. The great room where they had entered was by far the largest, but in the worst condition. More of the roof lay in heaps of rubble around their feet than above their heads. Fortunately, the broad ponderosa pine branches spared them from the brunt of the storm, although the heat was now melting the snow from the needles in a steady downpour and granting access to the rising wind, which made the bare plank walls shiver with each gust. It appeared as though someone had made a halfhearted attempt to reinforce the outer walls with stacked stones, debris, and shingles and planks with bent, rusted nails protruding from them. There was a section of the dirt floor where it almost looked like some animal had tried to dig a tunnel straight down into the hard earth. Old furniture had been broken beyond recognition, save for the tarnished brass knobs and handles partially buried in the dirt.
The other rooms were in marginally better condition. A small chamber with a rust-ravaged tin roof must have served as dry storage. Moldering leaves and dead aspen saplings dominated the frosted floor amid a scattering of opaque broken glass. There were still mason jars and cans of food rusting in the back corner beside a small square entryway that led into a stone-lined cellar excavated into the hillside. It looked more like a tomb than cold storage, and barely had enough room to contain all of the spider webs and insect carcasses. There were rusted brass bullet casings from the days before mass commercial loading on the stone floor, along with clumps of desiccated fur that suggested some animal or other had made its den in there. It smelled faintly of decomposition and feces, as though something had crawled in there to die and rotted to dissolution.
The final room, a bedroom to the right of the main room, showed signs of somewhat recent habitation. Sections of the fallen roof had been propped up with sturdy branches and there was a carbon-scored fire ring near a window that had been boarded over long ago. Shore had scrounged enough kindling to reignite the charred remains of what must have once been a four-poster bed. Vigil was resting reasonably comfortably in the opposite corner from the fire, away from the swirling smoke, which funneled up through the small holes and cracks in the blackened ceiling. Coburn watched Vigil’s chest rise and fall rhythmically beneath a silver tarp that reflected the orange and gold of the crackling flames.
It was reassuring to know that they weren’t the first to have been forced to hunker down in here to ride out a storm, although that didn’t change the fact that one of them was going to have to strike out in search of the camp and the temperatures were already plummeting as the sun began to set behind the peaks to the west. Not that the darkness caused more than a subtle diminishment of visibility through the blizzard.
Coburn checked the pulse in Vigil’s dorsalis pedis artery one last time, then set off in search of the others. He found Shore and Baumann standing outside in the snow, hunched against the wind, mere shadows in the waning light. Both gestured wildly in opposite directions as they argued at the tops of their lungs to be heard over the screaming gusts tearing through the valley. Beyond them, a shifting wall of white and gray masked the forest and the sharp descent into another invisible valley.
This was their fourteenth annual elk hunt. What at first had been a grand adventure into the wilderness had become more of an escape than anything else. The ties that bound them to their everyday lives had grown so strong that there wasn’t a man among them who couldn’t feel their pull even during this one week a year. As eighteen-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them, this had been a magical excursion into the unknown. Who was he kidding? It had been an excuse to blow off a little steam and drink a lot of beer. They’d stumbled upon a bull by accident on their final day and had been lucky to hit it once between them. It was hard to believe that those four kids had ever existed. This trip was now more about trying to find those distant shades of themselves than bringing down any mythical twelve-point behemoth.
Coburn couldn’t even envision the younger versions of Baumann and Shore as he approached. Blaine Shore had been a tall skinny kid then, and had grown into a tall skinny man, but all that remained of the long, stringy hair was a horseshoe around the sides and back. He was now the kind of guy who looked out of place without a tie and managed money market accounts or securities or some kind of funds, which essentially boiled down to investing other people’s money and taking a percentage off the top when he so much as thought about making a trade.
Baumann was, and always had been, the diametric opposite of Shore. How they had ever gotten along would forever remain a mystery. If ever a man had lived a charmed life, it was Todd Baumann. The good-looking kid had grown into a good-looking adult. He never exercised, but looked like he lived in a gym. He was the kind of guy who could get lucky just taking his trash to the curb. The teenager who had aced his classes without ever going and spent days on end playing computer games had written a program as a twenty-two-year-old grad student that had revolutionized some sub-platform of an existing matrix of…Coburn didn’t really understand what it was, but it had made Baumann the kind of rich that boggled the mind and allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.
Vigil had always been the most grounded of them. He had grown from a stocky kid into a portly man, but he wore his weight well, like he had always been meant to wear it and was just fulfilling his biological destiny. He lived a normal life with a normal wife and two stocky little boys who would undoubtedly grow up to do the same. He was a genuine kind of guy who said what he meant and did what he said and could always be counted on to lend a hand when a hand needed to be lent. He was the regional director of a national network of pharmaceutical suppliers, sat on just about every charitable board, and coached baseball in the summer and soccer in the fall.
Coburn had been the driven one. He had wanted to be a doctor, so he had busted his hump to make it happen. He had studied while the rest of his buddies were sleeping or out on dates or at the bars. Since things had never come particularly easy to him and he had never been especially intuitive, he had been forced to accede to the notion that he was just going to have to outhustle and outwork everyone else around him, which he had done through college, medical school, and his residency. And now that he was on-staff at the largest and busiest trauma center in the entire Rocky Mountain Region, he carried that same attitude into his daily work. He often wondered how the others had seen him back then, wondered if he’d ever really been a kid at all. He found it next to impossible to give up the responsibility and the dedication and the motivation, even for a single annual hunt with his old buddies. Pathetic as it was to admit, the “No Pagers and No Cell Phones Rule” had been his. Not because he didn’t want the outside world to be able to find him, but rather because the better part of him did.
“I’m telling you,” Shore shouted, “that peak over there is Mt. Isolation!”
“You can’t see a peak through this storm, let alone well enough to tell which one it is!”
“Just because
“We were heading southeast when Vigil fell-”
“We were heading due east.”
“Southeast. We were about two miles northwest of camp-”
“We were closer to a mile and a half west of camp.”
“So when we diverted east to help Vigil-”
“Northeast.”
“We needed to head to the southwest to get back to camp.”
“No! We needed to head west.”
“But instead we followed the bottom of the valley due south.”
“You’re out of your mind! We were headed north!”
“If we were on
“We were following the same valley we crossed maybe an hour before-”
“There’s no way we doubled back!”
“Guys!” Coburn interrupted. They both turned to face him, obviously surprised by the sound of his voice. They’d been so caught up in their argument that they hadn’t heard him approach. “We need to take a step back and look at this objectively.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing!” Shore shouted. “If it weren’t for Todd contradicting every damn word I say-”
“If anything you said made a lick of sense, I wouldn’t have to!”
“Guys! We’re wasting time we don’t have arguing. We need to figure out exactly where we are so that one of us can head back to camp and call for help. The last thing we want is to set off walking in the wrong direction and end up totally lost.”
“I’ve got news for you, Will. We’re already totally lost,” Baumann said.
Shore couldn’t help but chuckle.
“We can figure this out,” Coburn said. “All we have to do is trace our steps back to where we were when-”
“Shh!” Shore tilted his head away from the wind and closed his eyes. “Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” Coburn said.
“I’m not sure. It sounded almost like…almost like someone screaming.”
“It’s just the wind,” Baumann said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re smack-dab in the middle of a blizzard.”
“No. No…It wasn’t the wind. I don’t think so anyway.”
“Did you hear anything, Will?”
“No…but that doesn’t mean-”
“I’m certain I heard something.” Shore headed toward the ramshackle house. “And it came from this direction.”
Coburn caught up with Shore at the entryway to the wooden structure. He hadn’t been out there for more than five minutes, and already his eyes were watering and the skin on his face stung from the cold. His toes felt like icicles and his flesh prickled with goose bumps. The flickering glow through the gaps around the door and the boarded windows had to be the most inviting sight he had ever seen. He was already anticipating the warmth when he shouldered open the door and followed Shore inside.
The smell struck him immediately.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
“Oh, God,” he whispered and broke into a sprint toward where he had left Vigil.
* * *
Blood was a like a fine wine: the bouquet grew more powerful and pungent with age. Coburn was intimately acquainted with the smell, throughout the duration of its cycle. The residua in a cadaver’s liver smelled vastly different than either arterial or venous blood. Fresh blood was more metallic than biological. He remembered his first surgery, his first incision into the skin of a living, breathing human being, and how the smell reminded him more of opening up a machine than a man. It was a taste as much as a scent, really. An almost electrical tingle at the back of the palate. It was a smell he experienced nearly every single working day, a smell that he found disorienting and out-of-context in this cabin. A smell that he understood on a primal level meant very bad things had transpired.
Even though he knew what to expect when he burst into the small room, he was unprepared for what he saw.
There was blood everywhere. Arcs and spatters on the bare wood walls. Dripping in syrupy ribbons from the ceiling. Pooled on the exposed dirt floor. All of it glimmering with reflected firelight. The flames whipped back and forth, chasing the smoke on the violent wind blowing through the open window.
He tried to call out for Vigil, but no sound came out. It took every last ounce of effort to force his legs to guide him forward into the room. The blood was cooling and congealing as he watched. The glimmer faded and the streaks and smears darkened. Snowflakes turned to rain in the fire’s heat and spattered his face and jacket. At least he hoped that was water striking his face. He kept expecting to find Vigil sitting on the other side of the fire, behind the flames and the smoke where he couldn’t be seen from the doorway, but Coburn knew better. He had seen the blood glistening on the windowsill the moment he noticed the snow swirling in from the darkness outside. When he reached the window, he shielded his eyes and leaned out into the night.
The weathered sheet of plywood was half-buried in the snow to his right, at the extent of the light’s reach. The accumulation directly below him was a crimson mosaic of suffering. He recognized arterial spurts originating from a human-shaped impression, and the packed channel where Vigil had obviously been dragged off into the night and the dark forest.
The bloodstained snow was stamped with a riot of large, deep footprints.
Coburn turned and looked back at Baumann and Shore, who had barely managed to cross the threshold from the main room. He saw the unvoiced question on their faces.
What in the name of God happened here?
* * *
“We have to go after him,” Baumann said.
“He’s lost so much blood…” Shore said. “There’s no way…”
“Would you rather we just leave him out there? Is that what you would expect us to do for you?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I-”
“Give it a rest,” Coburn interrupted. “There’s nothing to debate. We’re going after him. And we’re bringing him back alive.”
Coburn ducked back into the main room, grabbed his rifle, and shoved between Baumann and Shore on his way to the window. He glanced down at the earthen floor. There were distinct grooves carved into the dirt where the blood had turned it to mud. It looked almost like someone had clawed at the ground to prevent being dragged toward the open window. There were other scuff marks, but no clear, recognizable prints or animal claw indentations. It had to have been a bear, though. No other animal worked in this scenario. It must have smelled Vigil’s fear or somehow sensed that he was injured, and come straight through the boarded window.
As Coburn expected, he found distinct claw marks in the wood of the frame amid the reddish-brown smears of Vigil’s hand and fingerprints. The wood was lighter at the deepest point of the scratches, at least the freshest ones. Some definitely appeared much older, the wood darker, which was surely just a trick of the dancing firelight or maybe the timber was so old it was close to being petrified.
He hopped up on the sill and glanced back over his shoulder. The others were heading in his direction with their rifles at port arms. He imagined he wore the same conflicting expressions of fear and determination on his face. It was one thing stalking elk through the forest with a warm belly full of whiskey, but going after a bear large enough and strong enough to go through the side of a house to attack a wounded man…one that had now tasted human flesh and blood…
That was another thing entirely.
Coburn raised his Remington and dropped down into a waist-deep drift. Even after a few minutes by the fire, the shock of the cold was paralyzing. He bared his teeth and struggled away from the window into snow that was barely six inches deep. The crimson amoebae of Vigil’s blood had lightened in color as the accumulation continued to amass on top of it. The edges of the drag marks were now barely discernible as the wind did its best to erase all signs of passage. Even the prints had been reduced to vague ovular impressions that weren’t even clear enough to confirm quadripedal locomotion, let alone betray the species of animal. It wouldn’t be long before there would be nothing left to follow.
They had to hurry.
Coburn charged toward the edge of the forest. The branches of the evergreens and aspens would trap most of the snow overhead, which meant that he would be able to move faster under the canopy. Unfortunately, it also meant that the tracks would be nearly impossible to follow on the moldering detritus.
He was nearly to the tree line and searching for the path of least resistance when a gust of wind made the shadows shift.
Coburn stopped so quickly that his feet slid out from beneath him. He scrabbled back to his feet, rifle at his shoulder, never once taking his eyes off of the forest through the swirling snow.
“Hurry up!” Baumann shouted as he charged past Coburn on his left. He barely had time to reach out and grab Todd by the back of the jacket. “What the hell are you-?”
Baumann’s rifle was seated against his shoulder in a heartbeat. It shook in his grasp. His eyes were impossibly wide. He took an involuntary step backward.
“Oh, God,” Shore said from behind them.
Coburn didn’t dare look away.
“Help me get him down from there,” Coburn said.
“A bear wouldn’t do something like that,” Shore said.
“Just help me get him down!”
Coburn walked cautiously, one step at a time, sweeping his rifle across the tree line a mere twenty feet away. The Remington was a powerful rifle that could drop a bull at three hundred yards like it was a point-blank shot, but at such close range, the scope was not only useless, it was in the way. The load didn’t scatter like buckshot from a shotgun; there was one bullet that was less than half an inch in diameter. And if he missed it would take him nearly two whole seconds to draw back the bolt, eject the spent casing, chamber another, slam the bolt home again, and pull the trigger. Based on the evidence around him, Coburn was certain that he wouldn’t have that kind of time. He’d once read that a grizzly bear could run at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour. At that rate, it would be upon him in half a second.
He halved the distance and stopped ten feet from the wall of pine trees. The wind was blowing so hard that it was snowing sideways. The flakes flew past so quickly that even standing still felt like he was moving to his right, but he could clearly see Vigil’s silhouette against the dark shadows lurking under the canopy. He’d been somehow suspended upside down from the skeletal branches of an aspen, his arms dangling toward the ground. He bounced gently up and down from the bough as he swayed in the wind. It was obvious he’d been stripped to the bare skin…and then gutted.
“No bear could do that,” Shore repeated.
“Yeah…” Coburn said. The telltale scent of evisceration, of warm blood and lacerated bowels, found him on the screaming wind. “I think you might be right…”
Movement in the shadows to his left.
“Back to the cabin,” Coburn said. More movement drew his attention to the right. “Get back to the cabin!”
He turned and ran as fast as he could, lifting his feet high to clear the accumulation. Shore was an indistinct blur ahead of him against the smoky light of the window. He heard Baumann shouting from somewhere behind him. Shore plowed into the drift against the house first and kicked at the planks until he managed to haul himself over the sill. Coburn spun and covered the edge of the forest while Baumann leapt up and scrambled through the window.
There was no sign of pursuit.
“Come on, Will!”
“Hurry up!”
Coburn turned, climbed through the open window, and fell down to the muddy ground beside the fire.
* * *
“I’m telling you, bears don’t do that kind of thing!” Shore’s voice carried from the main room. “They
“What else could have done it then?” Baumann said. He was sitting in the slanted doorway between rooms, where he could see both the front door and the side window. “I can’t think of anything that could have done that.”
“That’s exactly my point!”
“Men,” Coburn said without taking his eyes from the window, where he focused on the stretch of white that separated him from the forest, despite the snow blowing directly into his face. “Only men are capable of doing something like that.”
The silence was interrupted only by the wail of the wind. When it paused to draw a breath, he could see Vigil’s outline, still dangling from the trees. Every few minutes, he was convinced he caught movement in the shadows, in a slightly different location each time. Someone or something was still out there. Watching them.
Waiting.
A shiver rippled up his spine.
“What are we going to do?” Shore said, barely loud enough to be heard.
Coburn didn’t have the slightest clue. They had no idea who or what was out there, or how many of them there were. Until they did and had a solid plan of action, running blindly into the forest and the storm was suicide.
They had already barricaded the front door as well as they could. It had been unnerving how easily the pile of debris just inside the front door had slid into place against it. The only other window, on the front of the house, was still boarded and reinforced with broken lengths of ceiling joists. Where the wooden walls appeared most vulnerable, there were already stacks of stones and logs. None of them vocalized what they were all thinking.
They weren’t the first to find themselves in this position.
Coburn tried not to think about the hole in the ground in the main room or how long it must have taken to dig if the ground was as cold and hard as it was now. Had an animal dug it as he at first thought, or had it been a man trying to tunnel under the wall or just find a place to hide? If that were the case, then how long had he been trapped in here?
The wind shifted again and Coburn’s breath caught in his chest.
His pulse thumped in his temples, causing the edges of his vision to throb as he scanned the tree line. Each breath came faster and harder and he had to consciously ease the pressure of his finger on the trigger before he squeezed off a panicked round.
Vigil’s body…
It was gone.
* * *
“It must have fallen from the tree,” Baumann said. He’d switched spots with Coburn and was scanning the forest floor through his rifle scope. “It could already be buried with as hard as it’s snowing.”
“We should still be able to see something,” Coburn said.
“Not necessarily. Are you sure you didn’t see anyone drag it down? I mean, how closely were you watching?”
“I was watching that area the entire time.”
“You sure you didn’t maybe close your eyes for a few-”
“Tell me you could sleep right now, Todd.”
“Nothing personal, man. We have to consider every possibility.”
“Guys,” Shore said from the adjacent room.
“I didn’t close my eyes and I didn’t look away. I was staring right at it the entire time, but the snow…”
“Guys.”
“I’m looking right at the forest now and I can barely see the trees,” Baumann said.
“So you see what I’m saying. Someone could have waited for a big gust and-”
“Guys!” Shore shouted.
Coburn whirled to face Shore, who had crept closer to the barricade against the front door. His head was cocked toward a gap between a weathered board and a chunk of granite. His eyes were so wide that the whites stood out against the darkness.
“There’s something out there,” he whispered.
Coburn glanced back at Baumann, who waved him on and turned his attention back to his rifle and the night. Shore stepped back from the door to make room for Coburn beside the barricade.
“I don’t hear-”
“Shh!”
Coburn pressed his hand over his opposite ear-
A scratching sound on the other side of the door. Faint…almost like an animal clawing at the wood. Or maybe a branch had blown up against the door. It was impossible to tell.
Coburn eased up against the wall next to the barricade and tried to peer between the slats, but couldn’t see a blasted thing.
“Keep your rifle trained on the door,” he whispered to Shore, then ran into the other room to join Baumann at the window.
“What’s out there?” Baumann whispered.
“I can’t tell. Could be nothing.”
“Could be something.”
“Right.”
“Which means…”
“I’m going to need you to watch my back,” Coburn said. “I’m going out there.”
* * *
Coburn sat on the windowsill, his heart pounding, his frozen breath racing back over his shoulder, while he scrutinized the tree line through his scope. It was impossible to tell if there was anything out there. The snow obscured all but the most generalized details. Even the trees themselves now supported so much accumulation they were nearly indistinguishable from the storm.
He had to do this before he lost his nerve.
Coburn took a deep breath, held his rifle across his chest, and dropped down into the drift, which had already nearly resumed its original form. The moment he found his balance, he was moving at a crouch toward the corner of the house, the stock of his rifle flush against his shoulder. He pressed his back against the boards and listened, but he couldn’t hear a blasted thing over the wind. He glanced back at Baumann, who gave him a reassuring nod over the barrel of his rifle.
When he rounded the corner, the wind would be at his back, giving him an advantage in visibility over whoever or whatever was at the front door. If anything was there at all. Of course, his scent would also carry downwind…
He focused on his breathing to keep from hyperventilating.
In one swift motion, he swung around the side of the building and leveled his rifle at the area in front of the door.
Nothing or no one there.
He started forward. Slowly. Cautiously. One careful step at a time. He scanned the ring of forest to his left and directly ahead of him past the house. No movement. At least none that he could discern. The motion of the snow seemed to animate everything, lending life to the inanimate.
He heard the scratching sound as he neared the front door, but still couldn’t see anything. Maybe a hint of motion from beyond the wooden frame. A shifting of shadows within shadows. The door was recessed deeply enough to hide a man, especially if he pressed his back to the door. There was only one way for him to find out for sure what was back there in the darkness.
He held his breath and listened for the sound of breathing.
Again, nothing but that monotonous scratching.
He peeked around the corner and then ducked back.
No one there.
A sense of relief washed over him like a physical wave.
Thank God. It had to just be a branch.
Coburn crept closer, prepared to grab the branch, toss it away from the house, and sprint back toward the open window. He had already loosened his grip on the rifle when his brain caught up with his eyes.
It wasn’t a branch.
It was a hand.
A human hand at the end of a severed forearm.
Tied to a bent, rusted nail in the door by a tendon.
Swinging gently back and forth at the behest of the wind.
The curled fingers raking the wood.
* * *
Coburn whirled around and sighted down the forest along the length of his trembling barrel. He was breathing too fast to catch his breath. His pulse was pounding so hard in his ears that it was all he could hear. The hackles on his neck prickled under the weight of unseen eyes. It was snowing so hard that he could barely see the outlines of the trees forty feet away. How hard was the wind blowing? Even at such a short distance it would alter the trajectory of his bullet. He might have the opportunity to chamber another if he missed.
Might.
Movement from the corner of his eye to the right. No. To the left. To the right again. No. Straight ahead.
By the time he aligned his rifle, nothing was there.
Snow and shadows.
Shadows and snow.
Coburn kept his rifle trained on the forest as he moved to his left. One sidestep at a time. Careful not to stumble in the deep snow. Using his own footprints as a guide.
Footprints.
There was only a clear sheet of white leading to the forest. Not even the dimple of a track between the tree line and the front door. The wind had completely erased them. Whoever was out there knew exactly what they were doing.
Because they had done this before.
Coburn rounded the corner of the homestead and broke into a sprint. Stumbling and flailing, barely able to maintain his balance as he charged toward Baumann’s silhouette against the wavering firelight.
“Move! Move! Move!” he shouted.
Baumann barely stepped aside in time to avoid being knocked to the ground when Coburn hauled himself up and over the sill and crashed to the floor.
“What did you see?” Baumann called back over his shoulder.
Coburn was panting too hard to reply.
“We aren’t getting out of here, are we?” Shore whispered from the doorway.
Coburn didn’t know what to say. All he could focus on was the scratch-scratch-scratching of his friend’s severed arm on the door.
November 19th: Mt. Isolation
Two Days Ago
Time passed in minuscule increments metered by the sounds of their heavy breathing and the wailing wind. They rotated positions at regular intervals to keep their eyes fresh, or at least as fresh as they could be. One surveyed the sheet of snow leading to the tree line through the window while another watched the front door, the boarded window beside it, and the gaps between the wooden slats for any sign of movement, with the implied instructions to blast a hole clean through the side of the house if there was even the slightest motion within the shadows. The third leaned against the doorway between rooms, ostensibly resting his eyes.
It had to be getting close to dawn by now. Coburn had already taken two uneventful shifts at both the window and the door and now sat with his rifle across his lap and his face in his gloved hands, listening to the rhythmic
“It must have fallen off,” Baumann whispered. He was little more than a shadow cast by the waning fire against the far wall.
Coburn leaned around the doorframe and sighted down the gaps between the slats.
“Talk to me!” Shore called back over his shoulder. His voice positively crackled with panic. “Tell me what you see!”
“Shh!” Coburn whispered.
“Don’t shush me! You aren’t the one sitting in front of the open window!”
“Nothing,” Baumann said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”
“Then why don’t you switch with me and hang your head out into the blizzard?”
Coburn lowered his scope. He had been able to see reasonably well, but there had only been a world of white outside.
“Whoever was out there has to be gone by now,” Baumann said. “We haven’t seen anything resembling movement in hours.”
At first, the shadows in the forest had seemed to be in a continuous state of motion, as though taunting them. Maybe there had been someone or something out there. Or maybe not. Maybe the snow was blowing at just the right angle to replicate movement, or perhaps their eyes were just playing tricks on them. Whatever the case, the tormenting shadows had eventually faded away, leaving them with a stillness that was somehow worse. At least before they had known where their enemies were. Now, not only did they not know
“We should wait out sunrise,” Coburn said.
“And then what?” Shore said. “It’s not like this storm will magically disappear.”
“But at least we’ll have more light to work with.”
“To do what, huh? What do you propose we do?”
“We have to get to our camp so we can use the radio to call for help.”
“You’re joking, right? You want to leave here? And go out there?”
“We can’t stay here,” Baumann said.
“Why the hell not? We have heat and a roof over our heads. And we can defend ourselves here.”
“We can’t stay here forever.”
“We can at least ride out the storm.”
“That could take days.”
“Or the snow could stop in an hour.”
“We can’t afford to take that chance. We don’t have any food or water.”
“We can melt the snow and I think I still have a couple of granola bars-”
“What if they come back?”
Shore made a sound like he was going to speak, but said nothing.
The flames crackled in the fire pit.
Coburn stood and stretched the knots out of his legs. Somewhere out there, the sun crested the eastern horizon behind the dark storm clouds and the new day broke with a scream of the wind.
* * *
“How much longer do you think we should wait?” Baumann said. “I think it’s about as light as it’s going to get.”
“That’s a pleasant thought,” Shore said, vocalizing what they were all thinking.
The plan had been to wait out the dawn and hope it burned off some of the clouds. Instead, it almost appeared as though the clouds had blown up against the mountains and gotten stuck, while more and more rolled in to bolster their ranks. Any hope they had held that the snow might wane, if not outright abate, was now a match struck in the wind. The flakes had grown larger and the gales had grown stronger, all but swallowing the tree line a mere forty feet away across the windswept accumulation.
“We can’t afford to wait any longer,” Coburn said. “Not if there’s still a chance we can get help for Vigil-”
“Get help for Vigil?” Shore nearly shouted. “What the hell are you smoking? He’s dead and you know it!”
It was the first time any of them had actually said it out loud.
Shore leaned against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and slid down to the ground. Baumann seemed to deflate as he sighted his rifle out the window. Coburn sighed and shouldered on his backpack. He drew back the bolt on his rifle, caught the gleam of brass, then slammed the bolt home and locked it again.
“Then I guess there’s no point in sticking around here any longer.”
“We don’t even know where our camp is from here.” Shore sniffed and wiped the tears from his red cheeks. “We could start walking in the wrong direction and get even more lost than we already are.”
“Would you rather stay here?” Baumann said. “Where whoever’s out there knows exactly where we are?”
“We haven’t seen any indication that anyone’s out there in hours. For all we know, if it really was
“Then we probably shouldn’t wait around for them to come back,” Coburn said.
“So which way do you suggest we go?” Shore said. “Lord knows Todd and I can’t seem to agree.”
“You at least agree about the same general direction. I say we strike off to the northwest and let the topography guide us. Eventually we have to hit the stream Vigil fell into. From there we can find our way up to the path, then follow it to our camp.”
“Retrace our steps? That stream’s probably invisible under a foot of snow by now. We could walk right over it and not even know it.”
“You have a better idea?”
Shore stared out the window over Baumann’s shoulder for a long moment before he finally shook his head.
“Then we’re burning daylight,” Coburn said. He rose from his post by the front door, stepped over Shore’s legs, and headed straight for the window. Baumann was already perched up on the sill, rifle at his shoulder. When Coburn reached him, he dropped down into the drift.
Coburn climbed up onto the ledge and glanced back at Shore. The wind and the flakes tried to shove him back inside. He waited just long enough to make sure his old friend was going to follow, then drew a deep breath and plunged into the snow.
* * *
Coburn caught up with Baumann near the front door, where he was standing in the lee of the entryway, scanning the field in front of him through his scope.
“Look behind me,” he said when Coburn was close enough to hear his voice over the wind.
“What-?”
“Just look behind me!”
Coburn ducked under Baumann’s barrel and turned to face the door. He saw the bent nail from which Vigil’s arm had hung. There were faint scratches in the aged wood from the fingernails, but the hand itself was gone, as he had expected. With as hard as the wind was blowing, the tendon never would have held for long. He looked down at the ground, where the snow was somewhat shielded from the wind. There was the hand-
“Jesus!” Coburn gasped and stumbled backward. His heel caught on Baumann’s foot and he landed squarely on his rear end.
There it was on the crusted snow in front of him. Or at least what was left of it. The hand. Vigil’s hand. The index and middle fingers were mere nubs where the jagged bones protruded from the tattered skin. The webbing by the thumb was gone and the skin of the digit itself had been turned inside out in the process of peeling it off. The meat at the base of the palm was gone, allowing the gravel-like bones of the wrist to poke through.
The edges of the wounds…all of them…the ridges…the ridges of teeth were clearly evident.
“We were right there on the other side of the wall,” Coburn sputtered as he struggled back to his feet. “Right on the other side of the wall the whole time. And we didn’t hear a thing. Not a goddamn thing!”
He imagined a shadow shaped like a man removing Vigil’s hand from the nail on the door, squatting down out of the wind, and bringing the fingers to its mouth-
There. In the snow.
The wind had done its best to obliterate them, but he could still see them in the center of a mess of bone chips. Two partial footprints and a handprint. Bare. Human. The balls of the feet and the toes, as though it had crouched like a baseball catcher and braced one hand on the ground as it crunched through skin and bone alike. The edges of the prints were indistinct, almost feathered or brushed, like mountain lion or bobcat tracks…as though the appendages that had made them were covered with fur.
“We need to keep moving!” Baumann said.
“What in the name of God is out here?” Shore said.
“I sure as hell don’t intend to stick around long enough to find out.”
“Those can’t be real tracks,” Coburn said. “Someone has to be messing with us, trying to confuse us.”
“Well they’re doing a bang-up job so far,” Shore said.
“Like they’ve done this before…”
“It’s now or never, boys,” Baumann said. “We’re too exposed standing out here in the open like this.”
“There are too many places for them to hide in the forest,” Shore said.
“That can work both ways,” Coburn said.
“Whatever’s out there could sneak right up on us and we wouldn’t see them until it’s too late.”
“Better moving targets than sitting ducks,” Baumann said. “We don’t have time to debate this! Get going!”
“I’m not going first!”
“Christ Almighty, Blaine!” Baumann turned to his right toward the hidden path that had initially led them here. “You’d better watch my back then!”
Coburn caught up with Baumann a dozen feet from the buried wall of pine trees. He could barely see their trunks behind their sagging branches, let alone anything that might have been hiding in the shadowed scrubs and brambles.
“Let me in between you,” Shore said, shouldering in front of Coburn.
Coburn turned around, seated his rifle against his shoulder, and swept his barrel across the clearing. The decrepit house was little more than a grayish blur through the blizzard. The wind had already begun to erase their path.
No sign of pursuit.
He turned back to the woods and hurried to rejoin the others.
Single file, they ducked under the canopy and out of the wind, and entered the dark forest.
* * *
Nothing looked familiar.
Coburn wished he’d been paying closer attention to his surroundings on the way in. It was readily apparent that they were following some sort of trail, but it would have been comforting to recognize even a single deformed tree or bend in the path. Something to confirm that they were heading in the right direction. Anything. Anything at all.
The enraged wind screamed in the distance, but reached them only as an attenuated breeze, barely strong enough to sweep the snow across the ground and make the branches overhead sway. Pine needles rustled and bark scraped. Snow fell in clumps onto the uneven accumulation, which wasn’t even half as deep as it had been in the meadow they just left. The dead leaves still crackled underfoot.
While he was grateful for the forest’s protection from the blizzard, he would have appreciated even what little sun graced the world without. A deep twilight reigned beneath the canopy; a perpetual state of shadow drifting around the trunks and through the scrub oak and saplings, forever trapped on the mountainside. It felt like he was being watched from every direction at once, and for all he knew he was. There were countless places to hide and the tramping sounds of their passage would easily mask a stealthy approach. His toes ached, his eyes stung, and he could feel the mucus freezing on his upper lip, but couldn’t bring himself to lower his stare from his rifle to wipe it away. His scope was useless and his normal sight alone couldn’t penetrate the deep pools of darkness. Still, he alternated walking backward so he could cover the forest behind them and jogging to catch back up when he lagged. At a guess, they’d come maybe half a mile and already the muscles in his legs were burning from trudging through the snow.
He was just about to turn and attempt to catch up again when he backed right into Shore, who grabbed him by the straps of his backpack and pulled him behind the trunk of a pine.
“What-?”
Shore clasped his gloved hand over Coburn’s mouth.
He swatted his friend’s hand away and peered around the tree. Baumann’s footprints terminated about five paces ahead, where he had ducked from the path to the right, behind a juniper bush. Coburn followed Baumann’s sightline deeper into the forest-
He ducked back behind the trunk and pressed his back against the bark. His breath blossomed in rapid clouds from his chapped lips.
Had he really seen…?
No.
No. He couldn’t have…could he?
His pulse thudding in his ears, Coburn lowered himself to his knees, leaned around the tree, and sighted down the dark path. There. About fifty feet away along a rare straight stretch, where the dense forest absorbed the snow-blanketed trail, was what he had at first mistaken with his bare eyes for a man kneeling on the ground.
The rifle trembled in his grasp.
Two femora, the upper leg bones, had been staked into the snow, mid-thigh-deep. They had been stripped of the muscle and fat, clear down to the knots of tendons and connective tissue over the trochanters and femoral necks, where the bones still articulated with the acetabula of the hip bones. The northern sides of the bones were rimed with ice, while the remainder was crusted black and brown. The viscera had been removed from the lower abdomen and the brim of the pelvis tipped at such an angle that it functioned like the seat of a chair. And there…sitting on that seat…was Vigil’s head.
* * *
Snow had accumulated on his ebon hair, which was crusted to his forehead by a brick-red smear of blood. The tips of his ears and nose were black with frostbite, his ordinarily caramel-colored skin faded to a pallid bluish-white. His eyes were dark recesses, save for the lower crescents of the sclera beneath his eyelids. His lips were plump and purple, his jaw askew like he was attempting a conspiratorial wink. The severed tendons and vessels from his throat dangled through the outlet of the pelvis, into which the circumference of his neck had been fitted like a collar.
The macabre tableau was just sitting there in the middle of the path, on a pristine sheet of white snow, without a single footprint leading up to it. Put on display with the sole intention of being viewed from this exact point. Staked into the ground where they would have missed it entirely had they chosen any other path. Placed where whoever had done this knew they would eventually end up.
They were being hunted.
And if whoever was out there had enough foresight to recognize that they would attempt to flee on the same trail they had used before, then it stood to reason that they would already be moving into place to cut off their-
“We should have stayed in the cabin,” Shore whispered. “I told you…we should never have tried to leave.”
“Shh!” Baumann hissed.
A sudden strong stench. Body odor?
Coburn reached for Shore’s backpack. He needed to silence his old friend and buy them some time to think things through. But Shore easily avoided his grasp and darted back down the path toward the homestead.
“No!” Coburn pushed himself away from the tree and made a desperate lunge for Shore, who shoved through the dense thicket ahead of him, just out of reach. “That’s exactly what they want us to do! They’re flanking us, Blaine! They’re already behind-!”
Warmth on his face. Wet heat. In his eyes. His mouth.
He couldn’t see. Stopped in his tracks. Wiped his eyes.
The taste. Salty. Metallic.
Cooling on his skin.
A tug on his pack from behind and he fell backward into the snow. Being dragged in reverse. His legs trailing him through the snow. The crimson-spattered snow. Red on the trees. Melting through the accumulation. Dripping from the branches.
Blood.
He gagged at the realization.
Shore’s blood. Freezing into his lashes, the stubble on his cheeks. On his tongue. Trickling down his throat.
The movement stopped and his field of view lolled upward, granting him a view of the canopy.
Baumann kneeled over him, his rifle directed back down the path.
Shouting.
“Get up, Will! For Christ’s sake! Snap out of it and get the hell up!”
Coburn found his grip on his Remington. Sat up. Raised the rifle to his shoulder.
“Shore…” he said. “I tried to stop him…tried-”
“He’s dead, damn it! And we will be too, if you don’t snap out of it!”
Baumann’s words cut through the disorientation and brought home the reality of the situation.
Coburn turned around and knelt behind Baumann to cover the forest behind them.
He tried not to look at Vigil, who stared through him with sightless eyes, or at the shadows beneath the trees that appeared to roil with life.
He tried not to taste the finality of Shore’s death.
Or think about the fact that there were only two of them left now, no one knew exactly where they were, and they were being stalked like animals.
* * *
Coburn struggled to keep his teeth from chattering. He was shaking so badly that the barrel of his rifle jittered against the forest, all but guaranteeing a missed shot. There was no choice but to let his nose run down his upper lip for fear of making even the slightest noise. His breath formed a frozen fog in front of him. The skin on his face and lips tightened against the cold, and already he could feel it starting to split.
He had no idea how long they’d been kneeling there in the woods, terrified to make a move, waiting for what was beginning to feel like the inevitable. The wind cut through their clothing and made it sound as though the entire forest was alive with movement. Their tracks had nearly vanished. Vigil’s hair was now completely white, his skin was crusted with ice, and, mercifully, his eye sockets had filled with snow. Every few minutes, Coburn was sure he saw motion in the distance, but it could have been clumps of snow falling from the trees or the dancing snowflakes shifting on the breeze.
“We can’t stay here any longer,” he finally whispered, barely loud enough to be heard.
When there was no immediate answer from behind him, he repeated his statement.
“Where do you propose we go?” Baumann whispered.
“Anywhere but here. They know where we are.”
“They’ve known exactly what we were going to do every step of the way.”
“Then we need to do the opposite. Something they won’t be expecting.”
“And just what would that be?”
“Do you think they’re watching us right now?”
“I’m not sure, but we should assume they are.”
“Then we’ve probably lulled them to sleep with how long we’ve been sitting here.”
“So they won’t anticipate sudden movement.”
“What
“The way I see it, we have four options. We can press on and try to backtrack to our camp. We can head uphill and hope to eventually find the trail, or at least get out of the valley. We can head downhill and follow the topography wherever it takes us. Or we can head back in the direction we came from.”
“I think our best choice would be to break away from the established trail and try to reach the camp on our own.”
“Then we obviously can’t do that.”
“Agreed.” Coburn paused and held his breath. He was positive he detected movement at the furthest reaches of his vision. “So what’s our least appealing option?”
“Heading back to the cabin.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
They sat in silence for several minutes. Returning to the cabin was a stall tactic at best, but at least it would be a defensible position. Out here, the enemy could come from any number of directions. And who knew? Maybe they would be able to wait out their hunters. And the storm. Once the snow cleared, they’d be unencumbered by the deep accumulation and the poor visibility. The biggest challenge would be surviving the interim.
“No time like the present,” Baumann whispered.
“We need a distraction to buy ourselves some time.”
“I say we fire two shots each. You shoot straight along the path like you’re trying to clear the way and I’ll shoot uphill into the trees. We agreed that those were the two most likely routes. If they’re out there-”
“They’re out there.”
“-they’ll be waiting for us to come right at them. And they’ll be wary we might shoot again. That ought to at least give us a head start.”
“That’s all I’m going to need,” Coburn whispered. “I don’t need to worry about outrunning them as long as I can outrun you.”
Baumann glanced back over his shoulder and Coburn smirked.
“I guess we’ll see about that.”
“I guess we will.”
“On my count?”
“You’ll need whatever lead you can get.”
“Awfully cocky for a man facing the wrong direction,” Baumann whispered. “Make sure you hit something or they might see through our ruse too soon.”
“I’m not the one you need to worry about.”
“See you on the other side, Will.”
“Not if I see you first.”
“One…”
The wind arose with a howl, shaking the treetops and loosing a cascade of glittering snow all around them.
“Two…”
Coburn sighted down a knot on the trunk of a pine near where he last saw movement. He swallowed hard and breathed out slowly through his mouth.
“Three!”
* * *
Coburn squeezed the trigger and took the recoil against his shoulder. He thought he heard the crack of splintering wood over the ringing in his ears.
He didn’t even aim the second shot. He just pulled the trigger, whirled, and leapt to his feet.
Baumann was already crashing through the brush ahead of him, his rifle held out to part the branches. Coburn churned through the deep snow and the shivering boughs in Todd’s wake. There was no sign of Shore. No blood on the branches or spattered on the snow. No bones. No body. Not even a single track in the snow. And then they were past where their friend had fallen and barreling through the forest, following a path that had already rid itself of any hint of their passage.
The ringing in his ears toyed with his balance. His legs were stiff from the cold, his feet blocks of ice in his boots. His own heavy breathing was deafening in the confines of his skull, which throbbed in time with his thundering pulse. He ducked and dodged and plowed straight through pine limbs and aspen branches that lacerated his cheeks and forced him to close his eyes. He burst from the forest before he even saw the meadow. The wind greeted him with a shriek and nearly knocked him off his feet. Baumann was maybe three paces ahead of him, charging across the perfect whiteness toward the dark shape of the house, which faded in and out of the blizzard.
Forty feet.
Thirty.
Coburn overtook Baumann with twenty feet to go. His lungs filled with fire and each step sent a painful jolt straight up his legs, but he didn’t dare slow. Not when he reached the house. Not as he passed the front door. Not until he rounded the far end of the house and took up position against the wall to cover Baumann.
Their tracks drew crooked lines across the meadow to the point where they merged and vanished into the trees. The storm was already filling them in and smoothing them over.
He was expecting to see several silhouettes streaking toward them through the snow, but instead he saw…
Nothing.
There was no one in the field.
Coburn nearly sobbed out loud in relief.
“Come on!” Baumann shouted, his voice made hollow by the acoustics inside the old house.
Coburn scanned the tree line one last time, then turned and ran for the window. The second he was close enough, he jumped up onto the sill and tumbled into the decrepit ruins once more.
* * *
The fire had nearly exhausted itself in their absence, waning to glowing embers that produced little more light than heat. Letting it die was just about the most painful thing Coburn had ever endured. As the glow petered, the cold seeped through the walls, rose from the floor, and blew through the holes in the roof with handfuls of snow that accumulated in deepening patches. But they had no other option. If they were to rekindle the flames, they would be sending a giant smoke signal into the sky that would point right back down at them. Assuming they had indeed fooled their pursuit, it would draw them to the homestead like iron filings to a magnet.
The blizzard had obliterated their footprints and leveled the snow, but showed no indication of slowing. The wind still screamed and the wooden planks still rattled against their rusted moorings. Maybe it had warmed a few degrees, although when nightfall descended, they would have no further protection from the plummeting temperatures. Coburn fought the urge to stomp the feeling back into his feet and instead paced the room, peering out through the thin gaps in his wooden prison while Baumann shivered near the window. Todd stood sentry five feet back, nearly in the dying fire, where he couldn’t be separated from the shadows at a distance. He rubbed his cheeks against his shoulders to break up the ice in his burgeoning beard, only to have it reform within minutes as the damp clouds of his exhalations froze to his face.
Coburn could feel the same thing happening to him, but at least his position afforded him a respite from the wind. Unfortunately, it also forced him to look at the points where the walls had been reinforced from within and the deep hole had been exhumed. He tried not to contemplate the circumstances of their creation, for there was a large part of him that wanted nothing more than to crawl into the pit, drag some debris down on himself, and embrace the darkness.
He shook his head to chase that thought away. He couldn’t allow himself to think that way, not if he hoped to survive. Better to focus his mind on keeping himself-keeping both of them-alive.
“We need to find some food,” Coburn whispered.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither am I, but we have to eat. Lord only knows how long we might have to hole up in here.”
“There’s a cheery thought.”
“You know what I mean. What do you have on you?”
“A couple candy bars. Maybe a handful of Skittles. I think anyway. You?”
“Some trail mix. Not a lot else. But I remember seeing some canned food in the dry storage room that could still be edible. Possibly.”
“Probably growing enough botulism to start a Botox clinic.”
“Could be tins of spam.”
“Who would have thought that processed pig snout and hooves would ever sound appealing?”
“You got the window?”
“I don’t have any other pressing engagements at the moment. Just make it quick, okay?”
Coburn shed his backpack, removed a baggie with little more than crumbs at the bottom, and fished around until he found his camp stove lighter. He clicked the trigger several times until a small flame bloomed from the long silver shaft, then ducked through the doorway at the back of the room. The tiny fire flickered in the draft, throwing shifting shadows from the skeletal saplings growing from the floor and reflecting from the glass shards in the snow. He cupped the flame and hurried under the ragged hole in the tin roof and knelt before the stack of cans. They were bereft of labels and shaped so as not to betray the identity of the contents. The rims were rusted together and the metal was the color of burnished brass, but none of them bulged with toxic byproducts, so he shoved them into his pockets and decided to check in cold storage, just in case.
He lowered himself to all fours and crawled through the tiny opening into the stone-lined chamber. It smelled of earth and rot, not unlike a horrific stench he recalled from his youth, of peeling a dead prairie dog from the side of the road. He had barely taken the time to peek inside earlier, what with all the spider webs and the whole death-reek thing, but he figured his survival was worth a few potentially wasted seconds.
He reached inside, brushed the webs out of his way, and crawled in behind the flame, which chased the crinkling strands back up to the earthen roof and made the rifle casings sparkle. The long clumps of desiccated fur were white and gray, and reminded him of a husky or a wolf. The air had to be well below freezing, causing his breath to form almost palpable clouds and the stones to be rimed with frost. He crawled deeper, following the flame, which barely cast a golden aura on the uneven walls. The shadows of the rocks moved with the light as though with peristaltic motion.
The cubby was actually larger than he had at first thought. As he neared the middle, his flame bent back toward him. Another few feet and he could clearly feel the movement of air, like an exhalation from within the mountain itself. He held the lighter up to the rear wall and-
Darkness.
He sighed in relief when the flame blossomed again. Yeah, there was definitely a source of airflow back there.
Shielding the lighter with his gloved hand, he studied the crevices around the stones. There. While most were mortared with crumbling dirt and a webwork of roots, there was a section that appeared to be composed of two large stones merely fitted together and framed by darkness.
Coburn held the lighter off to the side, slid his fingers over the top edge of the upper rock, and pulled it toward him. A cold breeze blew into his face as the stone clattered to the frozen ground. He leaned closer and…
A broad smile spread across his face. There was a backpack behind the rock. A tattered camouflaged number, ripped along the side, its contents spilled out onto the dirt. There had to be a half-dozen Slim Jim beef sticks, a cracked plastic jar of bouillon cubes, and four sealed plastic bottles of what looked like water amid threadbare clothes that had absorbed the color of the earth under them. He chiseled the food out of the dirt, shoveled it into the backpack again, and tried to pull it out of the wall, but it was frozen to the ground. He balled his fist into the stiff fabric and gave another sharp tug. The bag came away abruptly with a tearing sound and nearly sent him sprawling. He barely managed to keep from knocking himself unconscious against the low ceiling of the hollow, which, he could now see, was more than just a cubby carved into the hillside. With the backpack out of the way, he found himself staring into a tunnel that sloped upward into the darkness. It was barely wide enough to squeeze his shoulders through. Probably dug by whatever animal had shed the fur. But why would an animal tunnel into the cellar through the mountain…?
Coburn shivered.
Or had it been carved by someone from the inside, trying to get out?
The soil was black and still held the shapes of the objects that had been frozen to it, and ahead…were those claw marks? No. They were too far apart. And too deep. He reached in as far as he could and aligned his fingers with the gouges, then quickly retracted his hand. Close to a match. If anything, his fingers might have been a little smaller than those that had left the marks. The dirt. The dirt was scraped upward toward the opposite end of the tunnel…as though someone had curled his fingers into the dirt as he was being dragged out the tunnel from behind.
He imagined a man backing into the tunnel with all of the food he had left. Stacking the rocks in front of him so he couldn’t be seen. Waiting in the darkness. Scratching sounds from behind him. Dirt skittering down the earthen tube. The movement of shadows in front of him through the cracks between the stones. The attack comes from behind, from within the mountain itself. A scream echoes in the cellar-
Coburn backed out of the tunnel as fast as he could. He didn’t even think about restacking the stones. He just turned around, held the lighter out in front of him, and-
Stopped right where he was.
His breath caught in his chest.
All around the small entryway. Names. Names and dates. Carved into the wood. Some of them reasonably fresh. Some of them so old they were nearly indistinguishable from the faded planks. There had to be dozens of them.
John Michael Watkins, 2/5/74.
James Aaron Peters, 11-9-97.
Thaddeus Wilson Waller, December the Twelfth, the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-six.
William Clayton Rayburn, Jan 4, 1952.
The list went on and on. Coburn lost track of them when he saw the large words carved above them. Much deeper than all of the rest. As though the same hands that had added their names to the list had gone over the letters again for emphasis.
THEY COME AT NIGHT.
* * *
“Todd!” Coburn shouted as he burst into the main room and rounded the corner into the bedroom. “We have to get out of here! We’re running out of time! We can’t stay-!”
A hand closed over his mouth and he was bodily pulled into the shadows.
“Shh!” Baumann whispered into his ear. “Not a sound. You hear me? Not a sound.”
Coburn nodded and Baumann released his grip.
The fire was now dead. Only its scent remained, and even that wouldn’t last much longer with as hard as the frigid breeze was blowing straight through the window. Snow had already begun to accumulate on the ring of stones. The flakes hissed when they alighted on the charcoaled logs.
Baumann pantomimed for Coburn to get his rifle, then sighted the outside world through his scope. Coburn retrieved his Remington, aligned his aim with Baumann’s, and zoomed in on the distant forest through the storm. He could barely see the trunks of the trees with all of the snowflakes crossing his field of view. The canopy was buried in white. The detritus was hidden beneath the white. Everything was white, except for the bark on the trunks and the branches in the lee of the wind. And the shadows. Dark shadows that clung to the shrubs and cowered under the lowest branches. He was about to ask Baumann what he was supposed to be seeing when the shadows moved.
Coburn held his breath and struggled to keep his scope steady.
There it was again. Farther to the right this time. Behind the frozen skeleton of a scrub oak. Nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings.
“By my count, there are at least two more out there,” Baumann whispered. “They know we’re here.”
“I’ve got news for you. They’ve been ahead of us the whole time. They always knew that this was where we’d go.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because they’ve done this many, many times before.”
Baumann was silent for a long moment.
“What did you find back there?” he finally asked.
So Coburn told him.
* * *
“They come at night,” Baumann whispered. “I don’t get it. They’re already out there right now. And unless I completely lost track of time, the sun hasn’t set yet.”
“We both know what it means,” Coburn whispered. He bit the wrapper of a Slim Jim and tore it open with his teeth so that he didn’t have to remove his eye from the sight. He tried not to think about the side of the wrapper that had been frozen to the ground in a puddle of blood as it soaked into the dirt. Tried not to taste it. They didn’t have enough water that they could afford to waste a drop of it to clean it off. And they surely didn’t want to see the expiration date, either. “It means they’ll be coming for us soon.”
The temperature was falling by the second as the sky darkened behind the clouds, but at least they’d rekindled the fire. There wasn’t much point in trying to hide anymore. Whoever was out there knew where they were and undoubtedly already knew exactly how they would approach. After all, they’d been doing it for nearly a century, which brought to mind the question neither could answer with any kind of certainty.
“Who’s coming for us?” Baumann whispered. “Who do you think is out there?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Coburn thought about the claw marks on the board that had covered the window and on the window sill following Vigil’s abduction, the tracks in the snow where some large animal had crouched to consume the severed hand, the clumps of fur in the cellar and the pure savagery with which Shore had been killed mere feet from him. “But I think we’re dealing with a what, not a who.”
“Don’t try to tell me bears-”
“No, not bears.”
“Then what? What kind of animal could tie a hand to a nail by a tendon or make a display of Vigil’s head like that?”
“I don’t know.” Coburn took a bite of the beef stick and savored the flavor, if not the texture. “But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
* * *
The shadow of Mt. Isolation fell heavily upon the clouds as the sun abandoned them to the dusk. The blizzard intensified its efforts in response, filling the air with thick flakes the size of dimes. The wind screamed in delight and hurled them faster and faster, first one way and then the other. The accumulation swept up the side of the house and spilled over the windowsill, where it melted into a muddy puddle by the fire. Baumann knelt to the side of it, his back against the interior wall abutting the hillside, the fire to his right, his rifle directed out the window at such an angle that to see him would mean to be in his sights. He’d smeared mud on his face and his hands, and did his best to keep the snow from accumulating on his scope as it blew at him. Half a stick of jerky hung from his mouth like a cigar.
Coburn sat in the doorway, which he had been forced to widen with several solid kicks to collect more wood for the fire. He could barely feel its warmth, but that was enough. He needed to stay sharp and the cold helped him focus his senses. After all, he was tasked with covering the barricaded front door, the hole in the roof through which the boughs of the pine had grown, and now the door to the storage rooms and the tunnel to God-knows-where in their depths. His magazine was stuffed to the gills. He had an open box of ammunition in the left hip pocket of his jacket and eight more rounds lined up on the ground beside him. Just under two seconds to reload meant he needed to shoot first and ask questions later. It also meant that he couldn’t afford to miss.
He had crumbled a bouillon cube into a bottle of water, but it had been too cold to mix well and he found himself grinding his teeth on the grains. At least it gave his nervous energy some form of release. It kept him from practicing loading and reloading and rehearsing the plan over and over in his mind. If the attack came through the window, they would fall back into the storerooms. If it came through the doorway from the back rooms, they would try to hold off the assault from the bedroom. If it came through the hole in the roof, Coburn would fend them off as long as possible to buy Baumann some time. If they came from more than one direction at once, though…
Most of all, he tried not to remember the expression on Vigil’s lifeless face and picturing it on his own.
“How come you never got married, Will?” Baumann whispered.
His voice was tiny and quivered when he spoke. Coburn resisted the urge to turn around. He could hear the tears in his old friend’s voice; he didn’t need to see them on his face.
“I guess it was never a priority. Once I started med school, I became so focused on reaching the ultimate goal that I kind of lost touch with my personal life. Why do you ask?”
“You remember that girl Michelle McNeal from way back? The Kappa Delt? I still think about her. I wonder how things might have turned out had I done things…differently.”
“You mean instead of sleeping your way through her entire sorority?”
“I was just a kid, for Christ’s sake. We shouldn’t have to make choices that affect the course of our lives when we’re just kids.” He paused and Coburn waited him out. “I looked her up, you know. She’s divorced and living out in San Diego. I actually flew down there to talk to her, but when I saw her jogging into her apartment complex, looking even more beautiful than I remembered, I just…I don’t know…lost my nerve. I mean, what was I supposed to say? So I just sat out there in my rental car, staring out the window, until I finally ended up driving back to the airport and getting on a plane. I wish I’d gotten out. Wish I’d walked right up to her and told her that I was sorry, that I messed up. That I wanted to try again. Try harder. Do better this time. But now I’ll never have that chance. Funny how you’re only granted clarity at the end, isn’t it?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Who’s going to miss you when you don’t come back, Will?”
“Be quiet or we won’t be able to hear them coming.”
“Vigil? Shore? Their families will be out here tromping through the wilderness for weeks, combing through the forest. But us? I don’t have friends. I have remoras. You know, those things that cling to a shark and eat the food that falls out of its mouth? As long as I have money, I have people around to tell me how amazing I am and pretty much cater to my every whim. Your patients, Will? They’ll find another doctor. The hospital will hire another surgeon. Vigil and Shore will leave holes that can never be filled, but us? We’re footprints in the snow.”
“We’re going to survive this, Todd.”
“That’s why I look forward to these trips all year. This is my only real human contact. You guys are all that’s left of my life before all of the money and success. You guys are the only real things left in my life. The rest of the year I feel like an actor on a stage, putting on a performance for an audience that cheers regardless of how badly I screw up.”
“We’re different, Todd. I don’t feel empty. I change lives. I
“Of course you are, but tell me, Will…how many times have you volunteered to cover holidays or picked up shifts for other surgeons to keep from having to go home to your empty house?”
Coburn said nothing. The wind shrieked outside. A clump of snow fell through the hole in the roof and he nearly fired blindly in surprise.
“Do me a favor, Will. If you make it, will you get in touch with Michelle for me? Tell her…tell her I’m sorry.”
“Tell her yourself. We’re both getting out of here. I don’t want to hear any more nonsense. We’re going to get through this.”
The words sounded hollow, even to his own ears. He tried to concentrate on his surroundings, on each and every minute sound. The boards creaked. The wind gusted. Snowflakes pelted the side of the house. Todd sniffed. The fire crackled. And somewhere in the distance, he was sure he heard what sounded like a bear’s roar.
November 20th: Mt. Isolation
Yesterday
Time slowed. Seconds became minutes, minutes hours, and hours eternities. Had he a watch, Coburn would have glanced at it so often that time might actually have stopped. Assuming he would have been able to read it, anyway. He was shaking so badly he could barely maintain his grip on his rifle. He had to bite his lip to keep his teeth from chattering. He looked from one egress to the next to the next so quickly that he was starting to make himself dizzy.
Why weren’t they coming? What in God’s name were they waiting for?
His heartbeat was too loud. The sound of his breathing was deafening. How was he supposed to hear anything over all of the noise inside his own skull?
A clump of snow fell through the roof.
The needles and branches were still shaking when Coburn looked up.
“Did you hear that?” Baumann whispered.
Coburn peeked back over his shoulder. Baumann was looking up at the ceiling. His stare traveled slowly toward Coburn as though following the progress of something Coburn still couldn’t hear.
A moment passed.
Creaking overhead.
Barely audible, like the gentle transfer of weight from one foot to the next. Stealthy movement. Slow. Deceptive.
More snow fell through the hole and landed with a soft thump.
There was definitely something up there.
Coburn raised his rifle and tracked the footsteps with his barrel. Moving toward the hole.
Closer.
Closer still.
He tightened his finger on the trigger.
Another footstep.
Pause.
Then another.
He tried to swallow the lump in his throat, but produced only a dry clicking noise. He could hardly breathe.
One thought: Just under two seconds to reload.
Another step.
A cascade of snow glittered as it fell around him.
Just under two seconds.
Two seconds.
Two.
Coburn squeezed the trigger and the rifle bucked against his shoulder. The report was deafening. Splinters flew. Snow fell through the new hole in the roof. Baumann shouted. A roar. Or was that just the ringing in his ears?
Pull back the bolt.
Jack the casing.
Chamber another.
Slam the bolt home.
Aim at the hole in the roof.
Six heartbeats.
Two seconds.
Movement.
Squeeze the trigger.
Deafening boom. Kick in the shoulder.
Dark form. Jerked.
Plummeting to the ground.
Coburn yelled in an effort to clear his head of the ringing.
A body struck his legs.
He scrabbled backward. Aimed the rifle.
Pull-jack-chamber-slam.
Faster this time.
Squeeze the trigger.
He was already loading another bullet when the body jumped with the impact. Flesh and bone spattered the wall.
Ringing…needles driven through his eardrums and into his brain.
Shouting, he staggered forward, thrust his barrel into the destroyed remains of his assailant’s face.
Recognition dawned.
Dark hair.
Blue-tinged skin.
Broken teeth.
Dark eyes.
Sweet Jesus.
Shore.
* * *
Ringing in his ears. The entire world was ringing. A high-pitched whine like mosquitoes inside his head.
He couldn’t breathe. Was he breathing?
Coburn fell to his knees and sighted through the hole in the roof, waiting for something else to descend upon him. Full of confusion. Seething with anger. He wanted nothing more than to bellow at the top of his lungs and fire repeatedly up into the gap.
“Show yourselves!” he yelled. He felt the pain of the words ripping up his throat, but couldn’t even hear them.
Nothing.
Only the swaying green-needled branches of the ponderosa pines and the snowflakes twirling down from the cold darkness.
He brayed like a wild animal and lowered his eyes to his longtime friend’s remains, crumpled on the dirt in front of him. His first shot had struck Shore in the upper left chest, destroying his clavicle and shoulder girdle. At such close range, the bullet had shattered the scapula and humeral head. There was no blood. The second shot had connected squarely with Shore’s forehead, leaving a jagged, bone-lined crater. Chunks of tissue, gray matter, bone, and hair clung to the wooden slats behind him. And yet there was no crimson starburst spatter.
He stared into Shore’s eyes. Whatever intangible substance had once animated them was long gone. There was ice in the lashes. The lids were swollen. Only the lower halves of the irises showed. Coburn did everything in his power not to look away from the eyes, for they were the only part of his friend that hadn’t been mutilated. There were holes in the cheeks through which the teeth showed. The ears were gone. The neck was little more than sinew and knobby vertebrae. The muscles had been stripped from the remainder of the body. There was no belly, no organs, just a section of lumbar spine to bridge the torso and the pelvis. The meat had been sloppily torn off, leaving the curled nubs of tendons and an ice-crusted layer of frozen blood on connective tissue. What little flesh remained was ragged…ridged…the distinct impressions of teeth immortalized in the blue flesh and the deep white gouges carved into the otherwise rust-colored bones.
“…out of it…”
A voice cut through the ringing, as if from a great distance.
“…damn it, Coburn!”
He glanced up and stared through a sheen of tears. The fire came into focus, and, behind it, Baumann posted at the window, a dark silhouette against the whiteness outside, shouting.
“Snap out of it!”
Coburn focused again on his rifle and pointed it up through the hole. He scooted as far away from the body as he could without losing his vantage point.
His tears froze to his cheeks as he stared up through the gracefully falling snow into the dense canopy.
* * *
“I can’t do this anymore,” Baumann whispered. “What are they doing out there? Why haven’t they attacked yet?”
“They’re just toying with us. Stay focused.”
“We should make a run for it now. While they’re off doing whatever it is they’re doing.”
“They know this forest better than we do. We won’t get far.”
“We aren’t getting
Baumann’s logic was inarguable.
A gust screamed across the face of the house.
Coburn was taking his turn at the window. The wind was blowing directly into his face, but at least it cleared the smoke and kept him from roasting in the heat. It had to be getting close to dawn. Or at least close to what passed for dawn in the shadows of the mountains and beneath the blizzard. At a guess, it had been about three hours since Shore’s corpse had been dropped through the roof, which, if his internal clock was remotely accurate, made it somewhere between three and four AM. There hadn’t been so much as a hint of movement and yet they both sensed their enemy out there in the darkness. The night positively crackled with violent potential, an electrical sensation that grew stronger and stronger with each passing second.
Another gust of wind wailed and beneath it…a deep rumble…a vibrating sensation in the earth as much as an audible sound. Coburn couldn’t be quite certain he had heard anything at all.
“Did you hear something?” he whispered.
Baumann paused so long before replying that Coburn started to ask again.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The storm intensified outside. So many flakes filled the air that the forest alternately appeared and disappeared from the blizzard like a mirage. There had to be more than two feet of snow out there. Were it not for the open window and the heat from the fire, the drift might have swept all the way over the side of the house in an effort to bury it. He tried not to think about how easy it would be to simply walk up the snowy slope onto the roof.
The wind screamed again. This time he was certain. Another sound lurked beneath it, a deep bass rumble.
“Tell me you-”
“Yeah. I definitely heard it that time. What do you think-?”
“Shh.”
Coburn thought he saw something move behind the tree line. Damn it. The snow was falling too hard to be able to tell for sure.
It was next to impossible to focus on anything through the scope. The snowflakes looked like bed sheets billowing past; big white blurs that obscured all but the most generalized details.
The wind shrieked. There was the sound again. Louder. Vibrating up from the ground and resonating in his chest like a freight train thundering past in the distance.
More motion at the edge of the forest. This time there was no doubt.
“Movement at twelve o’clock,” Coburn whispered. “One o’clock now. No…eleven…”
“What do you see, Will? Tell me what you-”
A loud roar.
“
There was no wind to conceal it this time, no mistaking it.
A deep, feral roar that cut through the night. It grumbled like an avalanche across the clearing and left in its wake a silence so oppressive Coburn feared even to breathe.
“Was that a bear?” Baumann whispered.
“That didn’t sound like any kind of bear to me.”
“Then what in God’s name-?”
“
A third. Directly ahead.
“They’re coming for us,” Baumann said. His voice rose an octave. “They’re coming!”
Another roar. Another. They echoed from the side of the mountain, making their precise origin impossible to pinpoint.
“
Shadows against the forest, barely distinguishable from the night. Mere specters darting from behind one trunk to the next.
They were out there.
The entire forest appeared to ripple with movement.
“
And another.
One on top of the other.
“
Frenetic movement.
Then sudden stillness.
Silence settled over the entire valley. Even the wind, it seemed, hesitated to draw breath. The flakes settled like the wings of butterflies onto a placid mat of their brethren.
Coburn’s heartbeat thudded in his ears as he scanned the tree line.
Where did they go? They were just there.
“Talk to me, Will. What do you see?”
“Nothing.” Coburn scanned the forest, first one way, then the other. The trees faded in and out of the storm. “I can’t see a…wait.”
A lone silhouette separated from the shadows. Large and hunched. Low to the ground. Was it a bear? He couldn’t…couldn’t quite tell. He tried to zero in on it through the scope-
Another silhouette materialized from the woods to the right of the first.
Another to its left.
“Fall back,” Coburn whispered.
“What is it? Damn it, Will! What do you-?”
“I said fall back!”
The lead silhouette rose to its full height and extended its long arms out to its sides. Coburn caught but the most fleeting of glimpses, but the silhouette appeared to be made from the blizzard itself. It arched its back and roared up into the sky. Clumps of snow fell from the trees behind it.
“
And then it was low to the ground and hurtling across the clearing.
Coburn shouted and fired at the lead blur streaking through the snow.
“Move! Move!”
Forty feet.
Thirty miles an hour.
Half a second.
They were coming too fast to hold them off.
Coburn whirled and leapt to his feet in one motion. Embers exploded ahead of him as he kicked through the fire. He barely managed to keep from falling onto his face.
Baumann was already exiting the rear of the main room as he entered.
A crash behind him. The front door shuddered. Debris tumbled from the barricade and scattered around his feet.
Grunting sounds, like someone being repeatedly punched in the gut.
“
The distinct clattering sound of nails on the roof overhead. On the bedroom window sill.
Coburn charged through the doorway and dove through the dead saplings. He slid on his belly across the frozen ground and through the small hole into the cold storage room.
Baumann was already shedding his backpack and preparing to shimmy through the tunnel into the mountain. Coburn shrugged the strap of his backpack off of his left shoulder, transferred his rifle to his right hand, and was just about to follow Baumann into the dark hole when he was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of dread.
Something wasn’t right here.
“
A roar from behind him made the entire structure shiver.
No…something was definitely not right.
“Wait…” he said.
Every step of the way they’d done exactly what their hunters wanted them to do.
His backpack slid from his arm and fell to the floor with a thud.
Baumann thrust his rifle into the tunnel and scurried in after it.
Their pursuers had made a grand production of drawing attention to themselves with all of the roaring and grunting and movement.
Coburn’s Remington fell from his grasp and clattered to the hard earth.
Whatever was out there had hidden from them this entire time. The only reason they would choose to reveal themselves now would be…
“Todd…no!”
…if they wanted to be seen.
Baumann kicked at the ground, propelling himself deeper into the blackness.
They were being herded.
Like they had been from the very start.
“Todd! Don’t go in there! That’s what they want us to do!”
He dove toward the sound of his old friend’s passage and managed to grab him around the ankles.
“
A deafening roar erupted from directly behind him in the small doorway leading back into dry storage.
The sound was still echoing in his skull when it was pierced by another one. Louder. Filled with agony.
Baumann’s scream.
“No!” Coburn shouted.
Baumann’s feet were wrenched from his grasp with such force that Coburn was left holding an empty pair of boots.
The screaming grew louder even as it became more distant.
Until it abruptly stopped.
And silence crashed over him like the floodwaters from a broken levee.
His pulse pounded in his ears.
The sound of someone crying far away reached him. It took a moment to realize that he was the one making the noise.
He dropped the boots and scurried away from the hole.
Silence.
Darkness.
He scooted backward and pressed himself up against the stone-lined wall; one egress to his left, the other to his right. He swept his trembling hand across the dirt until he found his rifle and drew it to him.
Pull-jack-chamber-slam.
The crack of the bolt engaging echoed into infinity.
Again, silence.
He shouldered his Remington and alternately pointed it at one hole, then the other. Mere degrees of blackness delineated them.
An overwhelming stench. Like he had smelled right before Shore was killed. Not body odor…smegma. He had to fight back the vomit rising from his gut.
Heavy breathing.
His? No. Not breathing…
Sniffing.
Coburn held his breath.
It sounded like there was a dog in the dry storage room. No, not a dog. Something much, much larger. A bull. Deep inspiration. Savor. Sudden expulsion of air. Again. Faster. Faster still.
Cold tears ran down Coburn’s cheeks.
Movement to his right. More of a sensation of movement than an actual physical sight. A shadow passing through a pool of tar.
More sniffing.
The sound aligned with the movement-
Coburn pulled the trigger and heard a wet spatter a millisecond before the report nearly deafened him. In such close quarters, the noise caused physical pain.
“
An earsplitting roar knifed through the ringing. Guttural. Gurgling.
Pull-jack-chamber-slam.
He felt warmth soaking through his boots as he fed more bullets from his pocket into his magazine and pulled his knees closer to his chest.
“
Something slapped at the ground in front of him. Frantic. It brushed against his foot. He managed to tuck his legs even more tightly to him. A chaos of invisible motion mere inches away.
“
Coburn directed the rifle toward the source of the motion as best he could and fired. The bullet whizzed past his ear and embedded itself in the hillside behind him before he even saw the sparks where it ricocheted from the floor and the stones on the far wall. A heartbeat later he felt the sting on his cheek and the warm flow of blood where the rock chip had embedded itself.
Ringing.
Pull-jack-chamber-slam.
No sensation of movement.
No roar.
Only ringing, which slowly gave way to the surprising proof that he was still alive.
Coburn sat shivering in the freezing nothingness, finger on the trigger, and waited. For another attack. For the impending dawn. For whatever came next.
All he knew with any kind of certainty was that he was too frightened to move.
* * *
The way he saw it, there were really only two options.
He could live.
Or he could die.
It was the only black and white decision he had made in his entire life.
Yet it was still a conscious choice.
He hadn’t heard them out there in hours. Not since the ringing in his ears faded. But that didn’t mean they were gone. For all he knew, they could still be sitting to either side of him, waiting in the shadows for him to make his move. Or they could be miles away by now.
But they would come back. Of that he was certain.
He tried to push aside all extraneous thoughts and focus on the prospect of his own survival. Not on his dead friends or the sound of Baumann’s dying scream, which still reverberated in his very soul. Not on the sickly sweet scent of blood as it slowly soured around him or the lingering residue of scorched gunpowder. Not on the marrow-deep cold or the blizzard outside. Those were distractions he could ill afford right now. There would be time to mourn his friends later. Time to follow through on his promise to Baumann. But only if he figured out a way to live through this.
The problem was that they had been focused solely on themselves. On
They came at night, but their movements weren’t restricted to the nighttime. Shore had been killed during the day. They’d been in the dense forest at the time. Did that have to do with an element of concealment? Was there an aversion to light or did they simply not want to risk being seen?
They consumed their prey. No doubt about it. The bite marks didn’t resemble those of an animal, however. In fact, judging by Vigil’s hand and Shore’s remains, the dentition almost appeared human.
They had clawed appendages. He had seen the deep scratches in the wood on the window sill and the plywood sheet, in the hand- and footprints in the snow. He’d heard them clattering on the roof. Seen the damage they inflicted.
They had fur. He remembered the faint impressions on the accumulation beside the prints and the dried clumps still down here in the pitch black with him, assuming they did indeed shed them.
They were capable of both bi- and quadripedal locomotion. In his lone, fleeting glimpse of them, he had mistaken them for bears, even after they rose to their full height and extended their arms. And especially when they dropped low to the ground and charged the house.
Their mental acuity was staggering. Regardless of the physical evidence, they didn’t hunt like animals. They had outthought and outmaneuvered Coburn’s party at every turn. They’d anticipated and outflanked every movement. They’d even used both Vigil and Shore in an effort to cripple their prey with fear and doubt.
All indications pointed to some kind of amalgam of man and animal. Or at least some kind of animal with seemingly human attributes. But he couldn’t think of a single living organism that fit all of the criteria.
There was one way to find out, though.
One conclusive way to know for sure.
That is, if he could still trust his sense of smell.
Coburn opened his backpack and reached inside. It was a moment’s effort to find what he was looking for.
The small flame erupted from the metal shaft of the lighter and cast a flickering glow across stone walls spattered with frozen blood.
But the body he had expected to find was gone.
* * *
He had smelled the fresh blood aging and the first phases of early decomposition from where he sat in the complete darkness. He had occupied his mind trying to estimate the sheer volume of blood required to produce the scents. Even with his extensive experience in some of the busiest surgical trauma suites in the country, his best guess had fallen well shy.
A black puddle had formed in the middle of the floor and now supported a layer of discolored ice. The dirt had turned to mud and frozen in choppy ridges transected by distinct rows of claw marks. Gobs of tissue and bone were congealed to the wall with blood and hair. Not just bone. There were teeth, too. The majority were broken and obscured by blood, but he would have sworn they looked human. The bullet must have struck whatever it was in the jaw and sprayed the ruined mandible straight up the wall. Based on the copious amounts of blood leading out into dry storage, it might have survived long enough to stagger off into the forest, but it definitely wouldn’t have made it very far.
Coburn concentrated on his sense of hearing, combing through the silence for the slightest sound to suggest his attackers were still out there. Minutes passed before he finally felt confident enough to crawl toward the center of the room. Every joint in his body ached from being compressed against the wall in the bitter cold, those that he could still feel, anyway. His toes were lost to him and his fingers were well on their way to joining them. The tip of his nose and his cheeks had passed from numbness into a world of hurt.
He had to set down his rifle in order to cup the flame from the draft as he neared the openings to either side. To his left, the tunnel was swallowed by darkness mere feet inside the mouth. The visibility was better to his right. He could see straight through the trampled saplings and the opposite doorway, all the way to the barricade. Everything was limned with gray from what little dawn permeated the storm clouds. He was only able to follow the trail of blood with his eyes as far as the main room.
There was no sign of anything out there.
The lighter flagged when a gust of wind battered the weathered wall in the adjacent room. A clump of snow fell through the rusted tin roof and nearly scared him to death when it hit the ground in front of him.
He brought the flame closer to his face and reveled in the momentary warmth on his bare skin. The time had come to make a decision.
Live or die. It was as simple as that.
And Coburn chose to live.
He steeled his resolve and made a decision.
He couldn’t stay here any longer. It was time to go.
Better to take his chances out there in the blizzard than to wait for them to return to finish him. He couldn’t hold them off forever. Out there, he at least had a sporting chance. He just needed to break the situation down to its most simplified components and formulate a plan.
First decision…There were two possible initial moves: one doorway led back into the house, the other into a tunnel that obviously opened somewhere higher up the mountainside. If he chose the house, he would then have a choice of three possible exits: the front door, the window, or the hole in the roof, all of which gave upon an open field with direct access to roughly two-hundred-seventy degrees of untamed forest and countless paths that led in any number of unknown directions. If he chose the tunnel, he would be slithering into a confined space without the ability to turn around quickly if he needed to. He would be crawling through his friend’s frozen blood in complete darkness without the slightest clue as to where he would come out. The former gave him seemingly limitless options; the latter only one, not to mention the fact that the prospect of choosing it was positively mortifying.
One was without a doubt a better option than the other.
His hunters had known exactly what they would do before they even knew themselves.
If these animals were utilizing their higher faculties to outsmart him, then maybe he could use his baser instincts to outmaneuver them.
Boil it down to the essentials. Don’t overthink it. Don’t strategize.
What was his ultimate goal?
Survival.
How was that achieved?
Escape.
How was that accomplished?
By distancing himself from his hunters.
How did he do that?
By placing one foot in front of the other and establishing forward momentum.
But in which direction?
His bearings were skewed and he didn’t have a compass. He was roughly eleven thousand feet above sea level. The only answer that made any kind of sense wasn’t a cardinal direction. He needed to descend in altitude.
Keep it simple.
He needed to go down.
And from there?
He needed to find help.
There. He had a plan. An elementary plan that required no thought, no strategy.
Keep moving forward.
Continue heading down.
Find help.
Basic. The kind of directions a dog could be trained to follow.
But even that plan still required that he make a crucial decision. Right here and now.
Into the tunnel or into the house?
Left or right?
Push aside all conscious thought.
Trust his animal instincts.
Coburn closed his eyes and nodded to himself.
Decision made.
There was just one thing he needed to do first.
One very important task, in case he failed.
He rummaged around in his backpack until he found his skinning knife, held up the lighter so he could better see, and set to work.
* * *
Coburn tucked the dulled skinning knife into the inner breast pocket of his jacket and brushed the wood shavings into a pile. He lit them with the dying lighter and leaned close to the diminutive flames. The small blaze barely produced any heat at all, but he savored every sweet second of it. He had a feeling it would be a long time before he experienced anything even remotely resembling warmth again. He appraised his work in the waning glow.
Like those who had passed before him, he had reinforced the importance of the message by going over the letters again, widening them as he went.
THEY COME AT NIGHT.
Then he added four names to the roll call of the dead, and, in doing so, consigned himself to his fate.
JOEL VIGIL
BLAINE SHORE
TODD BAUMANN
WILLIAM COBURN
NOVEMBER 20, 2012
He had cried the entire time, purging himself of all of the pain and the fear and the doubt. Everything but his instincts and his resolve.
The frozen tears glistened on his cheeks as the flame gave up the ghost and darkness swarmed in to fill the void.
Coburn slid the dulled knife back into its scabbord and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
It was time.
He was going to have to move fast, which meant he needed to travel light. Everything he absolutely had to have from his backpack was stowed in one pocket or other, including half of the remaining food. He left the rest, along with all of the collected canned goods, in his pack, which he tucked into the corner against the wall for whoever had the misfortune of coming next. He wouldn’t be walling it up in the tunnel considering he wouldn’t be able to turn around to do so once he was inside. That in itself bolstered his confidence in his decision.
Coburn drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.
He thrust his Remington into the hole and shimmied in behind it. The smell immediately struck him, but he forced it aside. He concentrated on pushing his rifle ahead of him and then wriggling to catch up with it. Baumann’s blood had hardened to an icy crust on the dirt, making traction tenuous at best. The flow of air against his face metamorphosed from a gentle breath to a frigid gust. He braced his knees and elbows against the sides for leverage and kicked with his feet. It wasn’t long before the tunnel widened enough for him to crawl. It grew steeper and steeper, all the while the darkness faded away until it revealed a drift of snow that had formed over the mouth of the tunnel, directly overhead. Flakes had accumulated on the bloody swath where Baumann had been hauled out into the open, but had merely whitened the deep red to a washed-out pink.
Coburn shoved aside the snow and broke through the crimson ice. He widened the egress just enough to propel himself through with his arms over his head. The wind hit him like a truck, pelting him from the side with such force that the snowflakes nearly beat him back to the ground. He crouched with his rifle at port arms and surveyed his surroundings.
He was on an exposed face of the mountain, roughly thirty feet uphill from the house, which would have been indistinguishable from the surrounding field from his vantage point were it not for the holes in its roof. The forest beyond had been swallowed by the blizzard to such a degree that he couldn’t see a single tree, which meant that anything lurking beneath them wouldn’t be able to see him either. Beside him was a boulder with less accumulated snow on it than its surroundings, presumably because it had been rolled away from the mouth of the tunnel. A sheer granite escarpment rose toward the sky behind him, at the top of which was a crown of ponderosa pines that speared the belly of the storm. Loose talus covered the steep ground, making every step a challenge as he negotiated a trail, of sorts, that would make a mountain goat think twice. He stayed low and hugged the rock formation to keep from both being seen and being thrown down the slope by the wind. Each gust cut through his clothing and seemed to peel off increasingly deeper layers of his bare skin. He could already feel the ice freezing in his beard.
The cliff at his back grew shorter until it melded into the forest. The path widened slightly and veered to the left, tracing the topography of the mountain into a deep valley, across which he could barely see the opposite forested slope through the snow. A twinge of panic momentarily paralyzed him as he rounded the bend and the house disappeared into the blizzard behind him. With the homestead gone, his bearings would be completely shot. It wouldn’t be long before he wouldn’t be able to find his way back again. The wind was already erasing his tracks. He had abandoned the only known shelter from the elements and forsaken it for the unknown.
He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing.
No, he had left the house behind in order to embark upon a trek that led to salvation. This was what he had to do. This was his only hope for survival.
“Keep moving forward,” he whispered. Fresh blood seeped through his cracked lips.
He placed one foot in front of the other. Repeated the process. Again. Again. Again-again. Again-again. Again-again-again-again-again-again.
The forest closed in from his left. The drop-off to his right grew so steep he could have stepped off the path and onto the treetops. He imagined a stream somewhere below the clouds; a crystal clear ribbon of water so cold in the summer that only the rainbow trout could tolerate it for more than a few seconds. He tried to picture it as it must be now, buried underneath inches of ice and feet of snow. Was it the stream Vigil had fallen into which felt like a lifetime ago now? Nothing around him looked familiar, and yet at the same time looked exactly like every other stretch of wilderness.
He needed to focus on the plan. He didn’t need to know exactly where he was going, only the direction that would eventually guide him to help.
The wind screamed through the valley, beneath the sound of which he thought he heard a distant bass rumble.
He picked up his pace; faster and faster until he was running, lifting his knees high, snow flying from his feet. Distance. He needed to create distance between himself and his pursuit; a gap too wide to close, miles of virgin white snow already absolved of his footprints.
Pine branches overburdened by accumulation sagged across the path in front of him. He held his rifle up, closed his eyes, and plowed straight through. The snow hit him in the face like an icy fist. He opened his eyes and let out an involuntary shout.
There was someone on the path, staring directly at him.
He tried to stop his momentum, but his feet slid out from beneath him, depositing him on his rear end. His Remington fell from his grasp and disappeared into the snow. He lunged to the side, thrust his hands into the snow, and grabbed his rifle. He brought it to his shoulder and aimed at his attacker-
“No…” he whispered.
He hadn’t recognized the face with the hair covered with white and the ice that had formed in patches on the blue skin and in the brows, lashes, and beard. But the eyes were unmistakable.
They were Baumann’s eyes.
Todd’s head had been raggedly severed from his neck at roughly the fourth cervical vertebra and impaled upon a crooked pike still ridged with bark. It had been staked into the accumulation, right in the middle of the path. There wasn’t so much as the hint of a footprint leading up to it. Beyond his old friend’s head, there was nothing but clouds and snow. The trail wound tightly to the left around another vertical stone embankment, to the right of which was a deadfall straight into the bottom of the valley, so far down he couldn’t see it through the storm.
Another bass rumble. More distinct this time. Closer. It echoed from the opposite mountainside, making its origin impossible to divine.
They were coming.
“
A guttural roar. Closer still.
He fished the snow out of his barrel with his index finger and directed his rifle toward the forest uphill from him.
Crashing sounds.
The treetops shook and snow fell from the branches at the crest of the second rise.
It was too soon. They couldn’t have seen through his ruse yet. It was too soon!
Grunting sounds from the woods.
Closing in.
“
A roar grumbled through the valley behind him, from one side to the other, like a semi speeding past on a highway.
He glanced left. His tracks vanished into the trees, beyond which the only path led back across the treacherous scree-lined escarpment and ultimately to the house itself.
He glanced right. The trail narrowed to such a degree that he would have sought an alternate route even under ideal weather conditions.
Behind him was another sheer granite formation. The upper canopy of the massive pines far below was barely visible.
And his hunters were streaking straight down the hillside through the forest.
Directly at him.
More grunting.
“
He retreated a step and tried to locate movement between the tree trunks.
A glance back over his shoulder.
He was on a stone point with no escape and nothing but open air behind and beneath him.
“
Another step backward.
“
The ground trembled underfoot.
Dear God, how many of them were there?
More crashing. Branches snapped. Clumps of snow fell.
Closer.
Closer.
Another step back-
He bumped into something and nearly crawled right out of his skin. He whirled in time to see the pike topple over. Baumann’s lifeless face stared up at him from the snow, his nose pointing off to the side. The tattered skin on his neck was ridged with teeth marks. The impressions on the bottom of C-4 where the marrow had been gnawed out were so perfect they could have been used to cast a mold of the front six teeth on both the upper and lower rows.
“
“
More grunts from the thicket off to his right.
The ground positively bucked beneath him.
He turned to his left. No way he’d ever reach the path.
To his right. Not a chance.
Behind him. A pitfall into the forest below.
Baumann’s face. Blindly looking straight through him. Four bloodless lacerations through his eyebrows and up his forehead past his hairline. One on his left temple. Whatever staked his head to the post had palmed it like a basketball. The hand itself had to be a good sixteen inches from the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. Maybe more. Mother of God…
“
Crashing. Pounding.
Thundering footsteps, beating a drumroll on the frozen earth.
“
Left? No.
Right? No, damn it.
Bushes shivering in front of him. Tree branches breaking.
“
Coburn fired into the brush. Snow and wood splinters flew. The stock kicked. The report crashed.
Pull-jack-chamber-slam.
“
The wind shrieked through the canyon, buffeting him to the side.
“
He shot at the sound, the shaking branches. The rifle bucked. The bullet sailed wide through the thicket.
“
Pull-jack-chamber-slam.
Twenty feet to the border of the forest. A quarter of a second to reach him from the moment they broke cover.
One shot.
No chance to reload.
If he missed, he was dead.
Even if he hit, there was no chance of survival.
Baumann’s horrible screams in his head.
Shore’s warm blood spattering his face.
Vigil’s head screwed into his savaged pelvis.
“
The trees shivered a mere twenty feet away.
Dark shapes through the blowing flakes.
The thunder of footsteps.
“
Coburn couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. He readjusted his grip on the Remington. Tried to hold the barrel steady.
Sudden and abrupt silence.
The movement in the shadows ceased. The trees slowly resumed a natural swaying motion in time with the wind, which carried that vile musky stench to him. Snowflakes swirled around him as if uncertain which way to go before being swept away from right to left.
In his ears:
There was no motion from behind the tree line. No sound.
He retreated another step.
What were they waiting for?
Left and right. No movement in either direction.
Straight ahead. Nothing. Just a wall of snow-blanketed pines standing shoulder-to-shoulder, skirted by skeletal clusters of scrub oak and evergreen shrubs.
Another step in reverse.
One shot.
Make it count.
Distance. Another step backward. Baumann’s head against his left calf.
Steady the rifle. Steady…
His nerves frayed, then snapped.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouted, spittle spraying from his bloody lips. “Show yourselves!”
His voice echoed back at him from the canyon behind him before the wind obliterated it with a scream.
Movement. Slow. Silent.
A mere bending of branches, at odds with the motion of the wind in the boughs.
Coburn raised his head and tilted the barrel to better see past his useless scope.
One shot.
One…
“
Movement.
“
The source of motion, just to the left of the broad trunk of a pine tree, behind a juniper bush, right where a drift of snow had formed against-
That wasn’t a drift of snow.
It rose up from the ground, a hunched shape seemingly molded from the snow.
“
It reached out with two long arms, parted the bushes, and lumbered cautiously out into the open. It moved like a gorilla, one fist down in the accumulation, its haunches low to the ground. Its long hair was stark white and blew sideways on the wind, replicating the movement of the snow. Had he not actually watched it emerge from the forest, Coburn could have stared right at it and never seen it. As it was, it started to blend into the scenery before his very eyes, save for the crimson streaks clumped into its hair from its chin down to the center of its chest.
“
Its chest compressed and its shoulders flinched when it made the sounds.
Its body was more slender than a gorilla’s, although it was difficult to truly tell with all of the hair. And the shape of its face was different. The short forehead sloped backward toward the hairline from an upturned pug nose, but the jaws didn’t protrude to nearly the extent of any simian. And the skin was pale, nearly translucent. It looked almost like Caucasoid skin over Negroid bone structure with an ape’s nose. It looked almost…human.
“
“Come on!” Coburn yelled.
It leaned forward, stabbed its balled fist into the snow, and moved closer. One lumbering step, then another.
Coburn aligned the barrel of his rifle with its broad chest. From this range, he could blow a hole the size of a baseball straight through it. Maybe even through the tree behind it, too.
It stopped where it was, as though sensing his thoughts.
Why was it just crouching there? Like it was daring him to take a shot?
“
It was as though it wanted Coburn to destroy it, but that made no sense. Why would it draw his attention to it, let him sight it down, when-?
Understanding struck him so hard he staggered backward and nearly tripped over Baumann’s head.
It was a diversion.
He swung his Remington to the left. There was another one. Nearly flush with the ground. Closer. Not more than a dozen feet away. He hadn’t even seen it slip out of the trees. It watched him through cold blue eyes, its face a Rorschach pattern of frozen blood. Its lips peeled back into something resembling a smile, its teeth rimmed with red along its gray gums.
He turned to his right. Another one. Even closer. Ten feet maybe. Two running strides and a lunge. A fraction of a fraction of a second. It held its left hand out to its side and unfurled its disproportionally long fingers. The creases in the skin were lined with blood. Its nails were short, but he could tell they were sharp, even from a distance.
Back to the one straight ahead.
It bared its teeth in triumph. It knew that it had him cut off from any chance of escape, that he had one shot before they were upon him, and he would undoubtedly take it at one of the other hunters who were closer to him, the more immediate threats.
It knew it had won.
Coburn’s plan had failed. Forward had failed. Down had-
Animal instincts.
Even if he did reach help, no one would believe him. No one who hadn’t seen them. No one who hadn’t survived them. Not without proof.
One shot.
Three attackers.
They knew what he would do. They always did. They’d done this before.
Movement in the woods. There were more of them back there.
Animal. Instincts.
“
Coburn squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the lead creature in the center of the chest with enough force to lift it from the ground and toss it backward into the bushes with a spray of scarlet. Ropes of blood trailed it through the air from the wound.
The ones to either side of Coburn froze and stared in shock at the fallen one bleeding the snow red, but he didn’t stick around to watch. He was already in motion before the body came to rest in the snow.
He dropped his rifle, spun around, grabbed Baumann’s head, and ran toward the edge of the cliff.
One thought.
Coburn leapt from the ledge. He cradled the head to his chest and tucked his legs close to his body.
A sensation of weightlessness.
An eternal sensation of weightlessness.
Time slowed.
“
Impact.
His feet struck the upper canopy with an explosion of snow and pine needles. He cartwheeled forward, crashing through branches, bouncing from boughs, ricocheting down.
Down.
Down.
Branches cut his face, tore his clothing. He tasted blood.
He hit the ground on the steep slope in two feet of snow. His momentum carried him onward in a tumble.
There was no breath with which to cry out. A darkness blooming from inside of him, threatening to absolve him of sight, thought. He flipped downhill, landed on his back, slid on the ice under the snow.
Slid over rocks and weeds and tufts of grass.
Fired from the crest of a steep knoll.
Landed, tumbled, slid some more.
Stopped.
Alive? Not alive.
Dead? Not dead.
Pain.
He existed in a realm of pain. Somewhere between life and death, where either alternative would have been a blessing.
The screaming wind. Driving flakes.
He pushed himself above the accumulation. His breath returned only to be expelled on a bellow of agony.
“
Soft. Distant.
He tried to rise to his hands and knees, tried to crawl, but fell onto his face. Something tucked under his right arm. He didn’t look at it, but he knew it was important. He shoved it up under his jacket, against his chest.
He tried again. Crawled.
One hand in front of the other. One knee in front of the other. Again. Again.
“
Still distant, but closer.
He somehow managed to stand, staggered forward. Fell. Stood again.
One foot in front of the other.
The cracking sound of ice beneath him.
Stream. He was on a frozen stream.
Streams led downhill to larger bodies of water.
Coburn limped into the blizzarding snow.
* * *
The pain kept him sharp, focused. The pain kept him alive.
Ribs were broken, but he no longer tasted blood. His right fibula was fractured, but it wasn’t a weight-bearing bone. His left radius was broken, Colles-style, forcing him to carry his arm against his chest to stabilize it. He used it to hold his cargo in place under his jacket. His head pounded mercilessly. He was undoubtedly concussed. Conscious thought gave way to animal instinct. He knew that should he stop moving for even a minute, he would be dead. So he concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, moving forward. He concentrated on heading down. And he fantasized about finding help.
Help: it was the shining light at the end of the tunnel; the culmination of all of his hopes and dreams; his entire world embodied by four little letters.
In addition to heading downward, he stayed downwind so as not to leave a scent trail. He left false tracks; backtracking in his own footprints before heading in a different direction entirely. He dragged a pine branch behind him to scour his footprints. He walked on ice or rocks whenever and wherever he could. He tried not to break any branches, trample any shrubs, or snag his clothing on brambles. He slid down embankments and wound through valleys. He ate only when he absolutely had to, and then only sparingly. He sucked on icicles to stave off dehydration. He held his bladder until he was able to find a place where he could break through the ice and urinate directly into the water, which swept his smell away. There were even times he suspected he slept even while he was walking.
He became an animal, in his mind and in reality.
The cold sustained him. It forced him to keep his eyes open, forced him to take deep breaths, forced him to keep moving his legs. It diminished the pain.
From time to time, he heard them. Far away, distant echoes rolling through the mountains like thunder. He swore he heard them barreling through the trees behind him, but whenever he turned, all he saw were the branches shaking in the breeze. He heard their grunts, that repeated fist-to-the-gut sound, and yet never saw them. After a while, he realized his own mind was conjuring most of the noises and began to doubt his sense of hearing.
Every second of life was a gift, a gift endured in infinite agony, but a gift nonetheless. Each hour that passed brought him closer to help. He began to hope. He began to plan. He started to envision different scenarios: barging into a rancher’s house and awaiting Medevac while deputies radioed directions to field units; walking into the Sheriff’s Department, slamming Baumann’s head down on the desk, and flying up into the mountains on a chopper with a heavily armed SWAT team; leading a small army into the hills to wipe each and every one of those monsters off the face of the planet.
Day turned to evening and evening to night. Darkness fell and he made a wish on the lone star he’d seen through the cloud cover in days, and then sacrificed hope to wage battle with his fear.
And still he placed one foot in front of the other. Despite the pain, despite the sensation of bone grinding against bone, despite the rib fragments that prodded his lungs with each inhalation, despite the bitter cold and the frostbite gnawing at his bare skin, despite the fear and the loneliness and the isolation and the memories of his dearest friends being butchered. Despite it all, he endured.
One foot in front of the other.
November 21st: Rocky Mountains
Today
A part of him knew that night had become day, but that part now resided in the darkness of his mind. His body was an automaton; a machine capable of little more than shivering and breathing. And walking. Walking and stumbling and falling and pushing himself back to his feet only to walk and stumble and fall again.
He had no idea where he was, no idea how far he had traveled, or how far he had left to go. Every tree was identical to the last, every peak a twin to the one he just passed, every valley a bottleneck opening onto another just like it.
His toes vanished for long stretches of time, only to announce their return when they caught fire inside his boots. His fingers did the same. Alternately freezing, burning, and vanishing.
Dawn. Sunrise. Morning. Afternoon. Sunset. Twilight. Night. All irrelevant concepts, words to mark time when time itself, it seemed, had ceased to exist. Or at least ceased to matter.
The him that was him was no longer him. The legs that supported him were no longer his. He was the river beneath the ice, flowing slowly and sluggishly, yet inexorably downhill.
Darkness.
Coburn regained consciousness with his face in the snow, vaguely aware that he had fallen yet again. He coughed out a mouthful of snow and pushed himself to all fours-
— only to awaken in the black world again. He couldn’t breathe. He panicked and pushed himself up on trembling arms. It took all of his strength to rise to his knees so that he could claw the snow out of his eyes and mouth.
A light.
A distant golden aura through the shifting branches and blowing flakes.
He bellowed in triumph, an animal sound that summoned a warm trickle of blood from his trachea.
He managed to create momentum and willed his legs to carry him onward.
November 21st: Pine Springs, Colorado
Today
Screaming.
All of the people in the diner are screaming.
The man sees them only as silhouettes, for the elements and the snow have blinded him. Red blebs float through his field of view, but his resolve is undaunted. He rolls onto his side and manages to prop himself up against the wall. He’s on a dirty black mat speckled with blue salt crystals from the sidewalk. There’s a tear in his jeans where the skin shows through. It’s marbled black and purple. One leg is crumpled beneath him at an angle that should be causing the snow-covered man pain, or at least significant discomfort, but he is oblivious. He just sits there with his blood-spattered jacket hanging open, the bloody impression of a face on his shirt like the Shroud of Turin.
People distance themselves from the Snowman, crowding toward the back of the restaurant where a dumbfounded cook is silhouetted in the window below the carousel of tickets. The griddle and the fryer sizzle and smoke behind him, forgotten. None of them want any part of what’s about to happen, yet they are helpless but to watch.
The silhouette of a tall man approaches. A star shape glitters on his breast. His hat has a broad brim. A cowboy hat. His boots make clomping sounds on the tile as he approaches the Snowman on the floor, who cranes his neck in an effort to better visualize the man with the star. The standing man tilts his head toward his shoulder and whispers. There’s a crackle of static and a woman mumbles a reply.
“Help,” the Snowman whispers, but it comes out as little more than a sigh. Again he tries, “Help.”
“Show me your hands!” the Starman shouts. He reaches for his hip, gives a tug, tugs again. His belt jangles. After an awkward moment punctuated by the sounds of crying and whimpering and snapping grease and clattering plates and silverware, the Starman is pointing at the seated man with both hands held together in front of him.
The Snowman smiles and fresh blood seeps from the cracks in his tattered lips. He nods to himself as though in answer to a question only he can hear.
“Help,” the man whispers again and starts to cry. He leans forward and makes a horrible animal sound that could be a sob or a laugh or in response to any of the myriad emotions that rapidly play upon his face.
He reaches out and picks up the severed head. The eyes are sunken into the sockets and the cranium is misshapen from the Snowman repeatedly falling onto it. The lips are pulped and the front teeth are gone. One of them is stuck to the blood on the Snowman’s shirt. It is obvious both by the sight and the smell that the head has been separated from the body for some time. And even more obvious, judging by the rictus of pain frozen to the man’s face, that his passing must have been a singularly excruciating experience.
The Snowman holds the head out for the Starman, presents it to him like a gift, an offering.
“Drop it!” the Starman shouts. “Don’t you dare move a muscle!”
The Snowman holds it up higher in response, tipping it to showcase the ridges where teeth have gnawed bone.
“Jesus Christ! Put that goddamn thing down and raise your hands above your head!”
The Snowman falters. The expression on his face is now one of confusion. He leans forward to set the head on the floor and barely keeps from collapsing. Something falls from the inside pocket of his jacket and makes a clattering sound when it strikes the tile.
“Back away from the knife!” the Starman shouts.
More screaming from the back of the restaurant.
The Snowman shakes his head and smiles again. This is obviously just a misunderstanding. It’s just a skinning knife. The tip isn’t even sharp anymore after using it to carve the names of the dead onto the wall. He can prove it. He can just pull it out of its scabbard and show the Starman that the blunted tip isn’t even sharp enough to prick his thumb.
“Back away from it! This is your last warning! Back away from the weapon!”
The Snowman grabs the knife from the floor, grips it by the hilt, and pulls-
The report is deafening.
The Snowman’s head snaps backward as he’s tossed toward the door.
The glass spider-webs away from the bullet hole.
It falls in shards onto the Snowman.
A crimson pool seeps out from beneath his head.
An arc of blood slowly dissociates into slender ribbons that trickle down the inside of the plate glass window above the scarlet-speckled booths, dribbling down the words painted on the opposite side of the glass.
ALFERD PACKER GRILL
HOME OF THE WORLD FAMOUS 72 oz. MONSTER SIRLOIN
ATTENTION BIG GAME HUNTERS:
WELCOME TO BIGFOOT COUNTRY!