Snowblind (9 page)

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.

Click.

Click
.

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.

J
OEL
V
IGIL

B
LAINE
S
HORE

T
ODD
B
AUMANN

W
ILLIAM
C
OBURN

N
OVEMBER 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.

Keep moving forward.

Continue heading down.

Find help
.

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.