“…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 cr
iteria.
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.
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