Snowblind

by McBride, Michael

  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.

  November 19th: Mt. Isolation

  Two Days Ago

  Time passed in minuscule increments metered by the sounds of their heavy breathing and the wailing wind. They rotated positions at regular intervals to keep their eyes fresh, or at least as fresh as they could be. One surveyed the sheet of snow leading to the tree line through the window while another watched the front door, the boarded window beside it, and the gaps between the wooden slats for any sign of movement, with the implied instructions to blast a hole clean through the side of the house if there was even the slightest motion within the shadows. The third leaned against the doorway between rooms, ostensibly resting his eyes.

  It had to be getting close to dawn by now. Coburn had already taken two uneventful shifts at both the window and the door and now sat with his rifle across his lap and his face in his gloved hands, listening to the rhythmic gratt…gratt…gratt of Vigil’s fingernails on the door. Occasionally the wind would gust and there would be a pause in the scratching, followed by what almost sounded like frantic knocking. Coburn couldn’t help but imagine Vigil standing knee-deep in the snow, a fresh skein of blood freezing to his bare skin, pounding to be let in. He had grown so accustomed to the sound, in fact, that he didn’t immediately notice when it ceased.

  “It must have fallen off,” Baumann whispered. He was little more than a shadow cast by the waning fire against the far wall.

  Coburn leaned around the doorframe and sighted down the gaps between the slats.

  “Talk to me!” Shore called back over his shoulder. His voice positively crackled with panic. “Tell me what you see!”

  “Shh!” Coburn whispered.

  “Don’t shush me! You aren’t the one sitting in front of the open window!”

  “Nothing,” Baumann said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Then why don’t you switch with me and hang your head out into the blizzard?”

  Coburn lowered his scope. He had been able to see reasonably well, but there had only been a world of white outside.

  “Whoever was out there has to be gone by now,” Baumann said. “We haven’t seen anything resembling movement in hours.”

  At first, the shadows in the forest had seemed to be in a continuous state of motion, as though taunting them. Maybe there had been someone or something out there. Or maybe not. Maybe the snow was blowing at just the right angle to replicate movement, or perhaps their eyes were just playing tricks on them. Whatever the case, the tormenting shadows had eventually faded away, leaving them with a stillness that was somehow worse. At least before they had known where their enemies were. Now, not only did they not know if whoever killed Vigil was still out there, they had no clue as to where they might be…or even where in the world they were, for that matter.

  “We should wait out sunrise,” Coburn said.

  “And then what?” Shore said. “It’s not like this storm will magically disappear.”

  “But at least we’ll have more light to work with.”

  “To do what, huh? What do you propose we do?”

  “We have to get to our camp so we can use the radio to call for help.”

  “You’re joking, right? You want to leave here? And go out there?”

  “We can’t stay here,” Baumann said.

  “Why the hell not? We have heat and a roof over our heads. And we can defend ourselves here.”

  “We can’t stay here forever.”

  “We can at least ride out the storm.”

  “That could take days.�
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  “Or the snow could stop in an hour.”

  “We can’t afford to take that chance. We don’t have any food or water.”

  “We can melt the snow and I think I still have a couple of granola bars—”

  “What if they come back?”

  Shore made a sound like he was going to speak, but said nothing.

  The flames crackled in the fire pit.

  Coburn stood and stretched the knots out of his legs. Somewhere out there, the sun crested the eastern horizon behind the dark storm clouds and the new day broke with a scream of the wind.

  * * *

  “How much longer do you think we should wait?” Baumann said. “I think it’s about as light as it’s going to get.”

  “That’s a pleasant thought,” Shore said, vocalizing what they were all thinking.

  The plan had been to wait out the dawn and hope it burned off some of the clouds. Instead, it almost appeared as though the clouds had blown up against the mountains and gotten stuck, while more and more rolled in to bolster their ranks. Any hope they had held that the snow might wane, if not outright abate, was now a match struck in the wind. The flakes had grown larger and the gales had grown stronger, all but swallowing the tree line a mere forty feet away across the windswept accumulation.

  “We can’t afford to wait any longer,” Coburn said. “Not if there’s still a chance we can get help for Vigil—”

  “Get help for Vigil?” Shore nearly shouted. “What the hell are you smoking? He’s dead and you know it!”

  It was the first time any of them had actually said it out loud.

  Shore leaned against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and slid down to the ground. Baumann seemed to deflate as he sighted his rifle out the window. Coburn sighed and shouldered on his backpack. He drew back the bolt on his rifle, caught the gleam of brass, then slammed the bolt home and locked it again.

  “Then I guess there’s no point in sticking around here any longer.”

  “We don’t even know where our camp is from here.” Shore sniffed and wiped the tears from his red cheeks. “We could start walking in the wrong direction and get even more lost than we already are.”

  “Would you rather stay here?” Baumann said. “Where whoever’s out there knows exactly where we are?”

  “We haven’t seen any indication that anyone’s out there in hours. For all we know, if it really was someone, they’re at home in bed by now.”

  “Then we probably shouldn’t wait around for them to come back,” Coburn said.

  “So which way do you suggest we go?” Shore said. “Lord knows Todd and I can’t seem to agree.”

  “You at least agree about the same general direction. I say we strike off to the northwest and let the topography guide us. Eventually we have to hit the stream Vigil fell into. From there we can find our way up to the path, then follow it to our camp.”

  “Retrace our steps? That stream’s probably invisible under a foot of snow by now. We could walk right over it and not even know it.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  Shore stared out the window over Baumann’s shoulder for a long moment before he finally shook his head.

  “Then we’re burning daylight,” Coburn said. He rose from his post by the front door, stepped over Shore’s legs, and headed straight for the window. Baumann was already perched up on the sill, rifle at his shoulder. When Coburn reached him, he dropped down into the drift.

  Coburn climbed up onto the ledge and glanced back at Shore. The wind and the flakes tried to shove him back inside. He waited just long enough to make sure his old friend was going to follow, then drew a deep breath and plunged into the snow.

  * * *

  Coburn caught up with Baumann near the front door, where he was standing in the lee of the entryway, scanning the field in front of him through his scope.

  “Look behind me,” he said when Coburn was close enough to hear his voice over the wind.

  “What—?”

  “Just look behind me!”

  Coburn ducked under Baumann’s barrel and turned to face the door. He saw the bent nail from which Vigil’s arm had hung. There were faint scratches in the aged wood from the fingernails, but the hand itself was gone, as he had expected. With as hard as the wind was blowing, the tendon never would have held for long. He looked down at the ground, where the snow was somewhat shielded from the wind. There was the hand—

  “Jesus!” Coburn gasped and stumbled backward. His heel caught on Baumann’s foot and he landed squarely on his rear end.

  There it was on the crusted snow in front of him. Or at least what was left of it. The hand. Vigil’s hand. The index and middle fingers were mere nubs where the jagged bones protruded from the tattered skin. The webbing by the thumb was gone and the skin of the digit itself had been turned inside out in the process of peeling it off. The meat at the base of the palm was gone, allowing the gravel-like bones of the wrist to poke through.

  The edges of the wounds…all of them…the ridges…the ridges of teeth were clearly evident.

  “We were right there on the other side of the wall,” Coburn sputtered as he struggled back to his feet. “Right on the other side of the wall the whole time. And we didn’t hear a thing. Not a goddamn thing!”

  He imagined a shadow shaped like a man removing Vigil’s hand from the nail on the door, squatting down out of the wind, and bringing the fingers to its mouth—

  There. In the snow.

  The wind had done its best to obliterate them, but he could still see them in the center of a mess of bone chips. Two partial footprints and a handprint. Bare. Human. The balls of the feet and the toes, as though it had crouched like a baseball catcher and braced one hand on the ground as it crunched through skin and bone alike. The edges of the prints were indistinct, almost feathered or brushed, like mountain lion or bobcat tracks…as though the appendages that had made them were covered with fur.

  “We need to keep moving!” Baumann said.

  “What in the name of God is out here?” Shore said.

  “I sure as hell don’t intend to stick around long enough to find out.”

  “Those can’t be real tracks,” Coburn said. “Someone has to be messing with us, trying to confuse us.”

  “Well they’re doing a bang-up job so far,” Shore said.

  “Like they’ve done this before…”

  “It’s now or never, boys,” Baumann said. “We’re too exposed standing out here in the open like this.”

  “There are too many places for them to hide in the forest,” Shore said.

  “That can work both ways,” Coburn said.

  “Whatever’s out there could sneak right up on us and we wouldn’t see them until it’s too late.”

  “Better moving targets than sitting ducks,” Baumann said. “We don’t have time to debate this! Get going!”

  “I’m not going first!”

  “Christ Almighty, Blaine!” Baumann turned to his right toward the hidden path that had initially led them here. “You’d better watch my back then!”

  Coburn caught up with Baumann a dozen feet from the buried wall of pine trees. He could barely see their trunks behind their sagging branches, let alone anything that might have been hiding in the shadowed scrubs and brambles.

  “Let me in between you,” Shore said, shouldering in front of Coburn.

  Coburn turned around, seated his rifle against his shoulder, and swept his barrel across the clearing. The decrepit house was little more than a grayish blur through the blizzard. The wind had already begun to erase their path.

  No sign of pursuit.

  He turned back to the woods and hurried to rejoin the others.

  Single file, they ducked under the canopy and out of the wind, and entered the dark forest.

  * * *

  Nothing looked familiar.

  Coburn wished he’d been paying closer attention to his surroundings on the way in. It was readily apparent that they were f
ollowing some sort of trail, but it would have been comforting to recognize even a single deformed tree or bend in the path. Something to confirm that they were heading in the right direction. Anything. Anything at all.

  The enraged wind screamed in the distance, but reached them only as an attenuated breeze, barely strong enough to sweep the snow across the ground and make the branches overhead sway. Pine needles rustled and bark scraped. Snow fell in clumps onto the uneven accumulation, which wasn’t even half as deep as it had been in the meadow they just left. The dead leaves still crackled underfoot.

  While he was grateful for the forest’s protection from the blizzard, he would have appreciated even what little sun graced the world without. A deep twilight reigned beneath the canopy; a perpetual state of shadow drifting around the trunks and through the scrub oak and saplings, forever trapped on the mountainside. It felt like he was being watched from every direction at once, and for all he knew he was. There were countless places to hide and the tramping sounds of their passage would easily mask a stealthy approach. His toes ached, his eyes stung, and he could feel the mucus freezing on his upper lip, but couldn’t bring himself to lower his stare from his rifle to wipe it away. His scope was useless and his normal sight alone couldn’t penetrate the deep pools of darkness. Still, he alternated walking backward so he could cover the forest behind them and jogging to catch back up when he lagged. At a guess, they’d come maybe half a mile and already the muscles in his legs were burning from trudging through the snow.

  He was just about to turn and attempt to catch up again when he backed right into Shore, who grabbed him by the straps of his backpack and pulled him behind the trunk of a pine.

  “What—?”

  Shore clasped his gloved hand over Coburn’s mouth.