Snowblind

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 gratt…gratt…gratt of Vigil’s fingernails on the door. Occasionally the wind would gust and there would be a pause in the scratching, followed by what almost sounded like frantic knocking. Coburn couldn’t help but imagine Vigil standing knee-deep in the snow, a fresh skein of blood freezing to his bare skin, pounding to be let in. He had grown so accustomed to the sound, in fact, that he didn’t immediately notice when it ceased.

“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 if whoever killed Vigil was still out there, they had no clue as to where they might be…or even where in the world they were, for that matter.

“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 someone, they’re at home in bed by now.”

“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 will they be expecting then?”

“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.

Jerk back the bolt.

Eject the spent casing.

Slam home another.

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.

Click.

Click.

Click.

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 save lives. I don’t need the audience or the applause. I’m comfortable in my own skin.”

“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.