And in the instant Death embraced the machine gunner, as the sound of Charlie's shot split the cold air, he saw that there was a second man on the ridge, thirty feet behind the first and over to the right, near the rocky crest. This one had a rifle, and he fired even as Charlie rec ognized the danger.
As if battered by a sledgehammer, Charlie was spun around and knocked down. He struck the ground hard and lay behind the boulders, out of sight of the rifleman, out of the line of fire, safe but not for long. His left arm, left shoulder, and the left side of his chest suddenly felt cold, very cold, and numb. Although there was no pain yet, he knew he had been hit. Solidly hit. It was bad.
The screams brought Christine out of the cul-de-sac, past the dying fire, onto the trail.
She looked up toward the ridge. She couldn't see all the way
to the top of the valley wall, of course. It was too far. The snow and the trees blocked her view.
The screaming went on and on. God, it was awful. In spite of the distance and the muffling effect of the forest, it was a horrible, bloodcurdling shriek of pain and terror. She shivered, and not because of the cold air.
It sounded like Charlie.
No. She was letting her imagination run away with her. It could have been anyone. The sound was too far away, too distorted by the trees for her to be able to say that it was Charlie.
It went on for half a minute or maybe even longer. It seemed like an hour. Whoever he was, he was screaming his guts out up there, one scream atop the other, until she wanted to scream, too. Then it subsided, faded, as if the screamer suddenly had insufficient energy to give voice to his agony.
Chewbacca came out onto the trail and looked up toward the top of the valley.
Silence settled in.
Christine waited.
Nothing.
She returned to the sheltered niche, where Joey sat in a stupor, and picked up the shotgun.
It was a shoulder wound. Serious. His entire arm was numb, and he couldn't move his hand. Damned serious. Maybe mortal .
He wouldn't know until he could get out of his jacket and theirmal underwear and have a look at it-or until he began to pass out. If he lost consciousness in this bitter cold, he would die, regardless of whether the Twilighters came along to finish him off.
As soon as he realized he was hit, Charlie screamed, not because the pain was so bad (for there was no pain yet), and not because he was scared (though he was damned scared), but because he wanted the man who had shot him to know that he was hit. He shrieked as a man might if he were watching his own entrails pour out of a grievous wound in his stomach, screamed as if he knew he were dying, and as he screamed he turned onto his back, stretched out flat in the snow, pushed the rifle aside because it was of little use to him now that he no longer had
two good hands. He unzipped his jacket, pulled the revolver out of his shoulder holster. Keeping the gun in his good right hand, he tucked that arm under him, so his body concealed the weapon .
His useless left arm was flung out at his side, the hand turned with the palm up, limp. He began to punctuate his screams with desperate gasping sounds; then he let the screams subside, though putting an even more horrible groan into them. Finally he went silent.
The wind died down for a moment, as if cooperating wah Charlie. The mountain was tomb-quiet.
He heard movement beyond the boulders that screened him from the gunman. Boots on snow-free stone. A few quick footsteps. Then wary silence. Then a few more footsteps.
He was counting on this man being an amateur, like the guy with the machine gun. A pro would be shooting when he came around the granite formation. But an amateur would want to believe the screams, would be congratutating himself on a good kill, and would be vulnerable.
Footsteps. Closer. Very close now.
Charlie opened his eyes wide and stared straight up at the gray sky. The rock formation kept some of the falling snow out of his way, but flakes still dropped onto his face, onto his eyelashes, and he needed all of his will power to keep from blinking.
He let his mouth sag open, but he held his breath because it would spiral up in a frosty plume and thus betray him .
A second passed. Five seconds. Ten.
In another half minute or so, he would need to breathe.
His eyes were beginning to water.
Suddenly this seemed like a bad plan. Stupid. He was going to die here. He had to think of something better, more clever.
Then the Twilighter appeared, edging around the hump of granite.
Charlie stared fixedly at the sky, playing dead; therefore, he couldn't see what the stranger looked like; he was aware of him only peripherally. But he felt sure that his performance as a corpse was convincing, and well it should have been, for he had provided a liberal display of his own blood as stage dressing.
The gunman stepped closer, stood directly over him, looking down, grinning.
Charlie had to strain not to focus on him, had to continue to look straight through him. It wasn't easy. The eye was naturally drawn toward movement.
The stranger still had a rifle and was still on his feet, better armed and more agile than Charlie. If he realized Charlie was still alive, he could finish the job in a fraction of a second.
A beat.
Another.
Irrationally, Charlie thought: He'll hear my heart!
That irrational terror gave rise to a more realistic fear-the possibility that the gunman would see Charlie's pulse beating in his neck or temple. Charlie almost panicked at that thought, almost moved. But he realized that his coat and the attached hood concealed both his neck and his temples; he would not be betrayed by his own throbbing blood flow.
Then the Tvilighter stepped past him, to the lip of the ridge, and shouted down to his fellow churchmen on the slope below .
"I got him! I got the son of a bitch!"
The moment the gunman's attention was elsewhere, Charlie rolled slightly to the left, freeing his right hand, which had been under his buttocks, bringing up the revolver.
The TWilighter gasped, began to turn.
Charlie shot him twice. Once in the side. Once in the head.
The man went over the brink, crashed through some brush, roiled down between the trees, and came to a stop against the broad trunk of a pine, dead before he even had a chance to scream.
-Torning onto his stomach, Charlie pulled himself to the edge of the ridge and looked down. Some of Spivey's people had come out of hiding in response to the rifleman's shout of triumph. Apparently, not all of them realized their enemy was still alive. Most likely they thought the two subsequent shots had been fired by their own man, to make sure Charlie was dead, and they probably figured the body toppling off the crest was Charlie's. They didn't dive for cover again until he shouted, "Bastards," and squeezed off two rounds from the revolver.
Then, like a pack of rats smelling a cat, they scuttled into safe dark places.
He loosed the remaining two rounds in the revolver, not expecting to hit anyone, not even taking aim, intending only to frighten them and force them to lie low for a while.
"I got both of them!" he shouted ." They're both dead. How come they're both dead if God's on your side?"
No one below responded.
The shouting winded him. He waited a moment, drawing several deep breaths, not wanting them to hear any weakness in his voice. Then he shouted again: "Why don't you stand up and let God stop the bullets when I shoot at you?"
No answer.
"That would prove something, wouldn't it?"
No answer.
He took several long, slow breaths.
He tried flexing his left hand, and the fingers moved, but they were still numb and stiff.
Wondering whether he had killed enough of them to make them turn back, he did a little arithmetic. He had killed two on the ridge top, one on the trail, three down in the meadow where they had huddled around the Jeep and the snowmobiles .
Six dead. Six of ten. Ho
w many did that leave in the woods below him? Three? He thought he'd seen three others down there: another woman, Kyle, and the man who had been in front of Kyle, toward the end of the line. But wouldn't at least one of them have stayed behind with Mother Grace? Surely she wouldn't have remained alone at the cabin. And she wouldn't have been able to come up here, on such an arduous hike. Would she? Or was she there among the trees right now, only sixty or seventy yards away, crouching in the shadows like an evil old troll?
"I'm going to wait right here," he shouted.
He fished half a dozen cartridges out of a jacket pocket and, hampered by having only one good hand, reloaded the revolver.
"Sooner or later, you're going to have to move," Charlie called down to them ." You'll have to stretch your muscles, or you'll cramp up." His voice sounded eerie in the snowy stillness ." You'll cramp up, and you'll slowly start freezing to death ."
The anesthetizing shock of being shot was beginning to wear off. His nerves began to respond, and the first dull pain crept into his shoulder and arm.
"Any time you're ready," he shouted, "let's test your faith .
Let's see if you really believe God is on your side. Any time you're ready, just stand up and let me take a shot at you, and let's see if God turns the bullets away."
He waited half a minute, until he was sure they weren't going to respond, and then he holstered his revolver and eased away from the crest. They wouldn't know he had left. They might suspect, but they couldn't be sure. They would be pinned down for half an hour, maybe longer, before they finally decided to risk continuing their ascent. At least he hoped to God they would .
He needed every minute he could get.
With the dull pain in his shoulder rapidly growing sharper, he belly-crawled all the way across the flat top of the ridge, moving like a crippled crab, and didn't stand up until he had reached the place where the land sloped down and the deer trail headed off through the trees.
When he tried to rise, he found his legs were surprisingly weak; they crumpled under him, and he dropped back to the ground, jarring his injured arm-Christ!-and felt a big black wave roaring toward him. He held his breath and closed his eyes and waited until the wave had passed, refusing to be carried away by it. The pain was not dull any longer; it was a stinging, burning, gnawing pain, as if a living creature had burrowed into his shoulder and was now eating its way out. It was bad enough when he was perfectly still, but the slightest movement made it ten times worse. However, he couldn't just lie here. Regardless of the pain, he had to get up, return to Christine. If he was going to die, he didn't want to be alone in these woods when his time came. Christ, that was inexcusably negative thinking, wasn't it?
Mustn't think about dying. The thought is father to the deed, right? The pain was bad, but that didn't mean the wound was mortal. He hadn't come this far to give up so easily. There was a chance. Always a chance. He had been an optimist all his life .
He had survived two abusive, drunken parents. He had survived poverty. He had survived the war. He would survive this, too, dammit. He crawled off the plateau, onto the deer trail. Just over
the edge of the crest, he grabbed a branch on a spruce and pulled himself upright at last, leaning on the trunk of the tree for support.
He wasn't dizzy, and that was a good sign. After he had taken several deep breaths and had stood there against the tree for a minute, his legs became less rubbery. The pain from the wound did not subside, but he found that he was gradually adjusting to it; he either had to adjust or escape it by surrendering consciousness, which was a luxury he could not afford.
He moved away from the tree, gritting his teeth as the fire in his shoulder blazed up a bit higher, and he descended along the deer path, moving faster than he had thought he could, though not as fast as he had come down the first time, when Christine and Joey had been with him. He was in a hurry, but he was also cautious, afraid of slipping, falling, and further injuring his shoulder and arm. If he fell on his left side, he would probably pass out from the subsequent explosion of pain, and then he might not come around again until Spivey's people were standing over him, poking him with the barrel of a gun.
Sixty or seventy yards below the ridge, he realized he should have brought the machine gun with him. Perhaps there were a couple of spare magazines of ammunition on the dead gunner's body. That would even the odds a bit. With a machine gun, he might be able to set up another ambush and wipe out all of them this time.
He stopped and looked back, wondering if he should return for the weapon. The rising trail behind him looked steeper than he remembered it. In fact the climb appeared as challenging as the most difficult face on Mount Everest. He breathed harder just looking up at it. As he studied it, the path seemed to grow even steeper. Hell, it looked vertical. He didn't have the strength to go back, and he cursed himself for not thinking of the machine gun while he was up there; he realized he wasn't as clearheaded as he thought.
He continued downward.
Tventy yards farther along the trail, the forest seemed to spin around him. He halted and planted his legs wide, as if he could bring the carrousel of trees to a stop just by digging in his heels .
He did slow it down, but he couldn't stop it altogether, so he
finally proceeded cautiously, putting one foot in front of the other with the measured deliberation of a drunkard trying to prove sobriety to a cop.
The wind had grown stronger, and it made quite a racket in the huge trees. Some of the tallest creaked as the higher, slenderer portions of their trunks swayed in the inconstant gusts .
The woody branches clattered together, and the shaken evergreen needles clicked-rustled-hissed. The creaking grew louder until it sounded like a thousand doors opening on unoiled hinges, and the clicking and rustling and hissing grew louder, too, thunderous, until the noise was painful, until he felt as if he were inside a drum, and he staggered, stumbled, nearly fell, realized that most of the sound wasn't coming from the wind in the trees but from his own body, realized he was hearing his own blood roar in his ears as his heart pounded faster and faster. Then the forest began to spin again, and as it spun it pulled darkness down from the sky like thread from a spool, more and more darkness, and now the whirling forest didn't seem like a carrousel but like a loom, weaving the threads of darkness into a black cloth, and the cloth billowed around him, settled over him, and he couldn't see where he was going, stumbled again, and fellPain!
A bright blast.
Darkness.
Blackness.
Deeper than night.
Silence . . .
He was crawling through pitch blackness, frantically searching for Joey. He had to find the boy soon. He had learned that Chewbacca wasn't an ordinary dog but a robot, an evil construction, packed full of explosives. Joey didn't know the truth. He was probably playing with the dog right this minute. Any second now, Spivey would press the plunger, and the dog would blow up, and Joey would be dead. He crawled toward a gray patch in the darkness, and then he was in a bedroom, and he saw Joey sitting up in bed. Chewbacca was there, too, sitting up just like a person, holding a knife in one paw and fork in the other. The boy and the dog were both eating steak. Charlie said, "For God's sake, what're you eating?" And the boy said, "It's delicious."
Charlie got to his feet beside the bed and took the meat away from the boy. The dog snarled. Charlie said, "Don't you see?
The meat's been poisoned. They've poisoned you."
"No," Joey said, "it's good. You should try some."
"Poison! It's poison!"
Then Charlie remembered the explosives that were hidden in the dog, and he started to warn Joey, but it was too late. The explosion came. Except it wasn't the dog that exploded. It was Joey .
His chest blew open, and a horde of rats surged out of it, just like the rat in the battery room under the windmill, and they rushed at Charlie. He staggered backward, but they surged up his legs. They were all over him, scores of rats, and they bit him, and he
fell, dragged down by their numbers, and his blood poured out of him, and it was cold blood, cold instead of warm, and he screamed -and woke, gagging. He could feel cold blood all over his face, and he wiped at it, looked at his hand. It wasn't actually blood; it was snow.
He was lying on his back in the middle of the deer path, looking up at the trees and at a section of gray sky from which snow fell at a fierce rate. With considerable effort, he sat up .
His throat was full of phlegm. He coughed and spat.
How long had he been unconscious?
No way to tell.
As far as he could see, the trail leading up toward the crest of the ridge was deserted. Spivey's people hadn't yet come after him. He couldn't have been out for long.
The pain in his arm and shoulder had sent questing tendrils across his back and chest, up his neck, into his skull. He tried to raise his arm and had some success, and he could move his hand a little without making the pain any worse.
He squirmed to the nearest tree and attempted to pull himself up, but he couldn't do it. He waited a moment, tried again, failed again.
Christine. Joey. They were counting on him.
He would have to crawl for a while. Just till his strength teturned. He tried it, on hands and knees, putting most of his weight on his right arm, but demanding some help from his left, and to his surprise he was able to shuffle along at a decent pace .
Where the angle of the slope allowed him to accept gravity's
assistance, he slid down the trail, sometimes as far as four or five yards, before coming to a stop.
He wasn't sure how far he had to go before reaching the rocky overhang under which he had left Christine and Joey. It might be around the next bend-or it might be hundreds of yards away .
He had lost his ability to judge distance. But he hadn't lost his sense of direction, so he crabbed down toward the valley floor.
A few minutes or a few seconds later, he realized he had lost his rifle., it had probably come off his shoulder when he'd fallen .
Dean Koontz - (1984) Page 35
