Snowblind

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 you can’t see it doesn’t mean that I can’t! I can see it plain-”

“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 either the southwest or the south face of the mountain-as you claim-before Vigil fell, then there’s no possible way we could have headed north! We would have been walking straight back into the same damn mountain!”

“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 can’t do that kind of thing!”

“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.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

* * *

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.