Snowblind

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.

Creak.

Two seconds.

Creak.

Two.

Creak.

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 anywhere just sitting here.”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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-?”

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!” from off to his left. He had barely started to turn his head toward the source when another roar answered from his right.

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

And another.

One on top of the other.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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. Where did they go?

“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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

“Umph. Umph. Umph.”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

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.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

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.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

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.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHuhh-rughrrr-gluttle!”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

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.

They come at night.

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 their escape. On their survival. They hadn’t given enough consideration to exactly what was hunting them. They had never actually seen their enemy, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Coburn didn’t know enough to piece together a picture. So what did he know?

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Down.

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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!

“Umph. Umph. Umph.”

Grunting sounds from the woods.

Closing in.

“rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr!”

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.

“Umph. Umph.”

More grunting.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

“Umph. Umph.”

Another step backward.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

“Umph, umph,” from just ahead and to the left.

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…

“Umph, umph. Umph, umph. Umph, umph.”

Crashing. Pounding.

Thundering footsteps, beating a drumroll on the frozen earth.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

Left? No.

Right? No, damn it.

Bushes shivering in front of him. Tree branches breaking.

“Umph-umph. Umph-umph.”

Coburn fired into the brush. Snow and wood splinters flew. The stock kicked. The report crashed.

Pull-jack-chamber-slam.

“Umph-umph-umph-umph.”

The wind shrieked through the canyon, buffeting him to the side.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

He shot at the sound, the shaking branches. The rifle bucked. The bullet sailed wide through the thicket.

“Umph-umph-umph-umph-umph-umph.”

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.

“Umph-umph-umph-umph-umph-umph-umph-umph-umph-umph.”

The trees shivered a mere twenty feet away.

Dark shapes through the blowing flakes.

The thunder of footsteps.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”

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: Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

There was no motion from behind the tree line. No sound.

He retreated another step.

What were they waiting for?

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

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.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

One shot.

Make it count.

Distance. Another step backward. Baumann’s head against his left calf.

Steady the rifle. Steady…

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

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.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

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.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

One…

“Umph.”

Movement.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

“Umph.”

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.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

“Umph.”

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.

“Umph. Umph.”

Its chest compressed and its shoulders flinched when it made the sounds.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

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.

“Umph.”

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

“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?

“Umph. Umph.”

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

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-?

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

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.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

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.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

Coburn’s plan had failed. Forward had failed. Down had-

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

Animal instincts.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

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.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

“Umph.”

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.

THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump.

Animal. Instincts.

“rrrRRaaAHHhr-!”

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.

Down.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!” from behind and above him.

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.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr…”

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.

Forward.

Down.

Help.

One hand in front of the other. One knee in front of the other. Again. Again.

“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr…”

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.

Downhill.

Coburn limped into the blizzarding snow.

Down.

* * *

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.

They come at night.

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.

Forward.

Down.

Help.