Edge of Night

by Ann Gimpel

  “Told you she’d come to her senses,” Dolan’s voice ringing in her mind was one of the most welcome sounds Corina had ever heard. “She’s smart enough to realize humans are on the losing side.”

  “Remember how we got to your compound?” Blair asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Put your arms around your friend. Visualize the place Dolan and I left you. Do it now. We will help.”

  “Leave the guns. We can't transport inert materials,” Dolan added.

  “Come on.” Corina let go of the rifle and wound her arms around Josh.

  “Come on, where?”

  “Just hold onto me. I’m getting us out of here.”

  “Okay, Cori. Hurry. I think I hear footsteps from upstairs.”

  She listened. Crap. He was right. She took a deep breath, and then one more, visualizing the place in the midst of urban rot where Blair and Dolan had left her. The walls of the cell became less substantial, first thinning, then disappearing altogether. Josh’s breath was loud in her ears. His fingers tightened against her back.

  They tumbled out into the dawn of a new day. Blair and Dolan stood, arms crossed. “What made you decide not to betray us?” Dolan asked, his voice a mixture of anger and curiosity.

  Cori let go of Josh. She walked to stand in front of Dolan, locking gazes with him. “What’s left of humanity has devolved into ignorant, superstitious wretches. I can’t live that way anymore. My blood holds the key to mount a defense against the Loki, but my fellow humans are too stupid to be interested. Besides,” she laughed bitterly, “throwing my lot in with you seems better than death in front of a firing squad.”

  She looked over one shoulder at Josh and gestured for him to come forward. “We’re a package deal, he and I. Give him the injection, too. But I’m going to monitor it. Better yet, let me inject him.”

  “And then what?” Blair asked.

  “Who knows?” Corina felt a grim smile split her face. “Maybe we’ll start a third genotype here. One with power, but that can think on our own.”

  “Why would we want you to do that?” Dolan made a grab for her arm, but she sidestepped him.

  “Because we can help you hybrids, too. We understand how humans think. See, we’re one step closer to them than you are. If you’re as open-minded as you claim to be, we can help each other.”

  And I can be a doctor again.

  Blair sounded thoughtful. “It would be useful to have another group like us who think for themselves. The ones we have to watch over all the time are a pain in the ass.”

  Dolan cocked his head to one side. “You may have a point.”

  “First, let me take care of Josh. I know you’ve got the stuff in that pack.” Corina held out a hand, not surprised when Dolan rummaged through his rucksack and handed her a syringe and a glass vial with a rubber stopper. “How much?”

  “Three ccs.”

  Josh looked terrified, pupils so dilated his eyes appeared nearly black.

  “It will be all right.” She tried to sound reassuring. “Close your eyes. Visualize the blood flowing through your body. Now focus on it flowing through your liver,” she laid a hand over his midsection, “and your kidneys.” She tapped the middle of his back on both sides of his spine. “Tell yourself, not my brain. Not my brain. Not my brain.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “It worked for me. Now put out your arm. You want the power this will give you. Trust me on that.”

  He laughed weakly. “If it will let me do what you did inside the compound, you bet I do. I think you could have killed those two by looking cross-eyed at them.”

  She tapped the bubbles out of the syringe, found a vein and drove the needle home. Deep in some secret recess in her soul, Corina warmed to the idea of being Mother to a new race. Maybe they could find a way to coexist with the Loki as equals. And humans.

  One thing was certain, almost anything would be better than the life she’d left.

  Josh smiled at her. His eyes were shading to blue. “I think I can feel it working, Cori.” He breathed deep. “And I like what I feel.”

  She pulled out the needle, and held him close.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Originally published by Perihelion SF Webzine in December, 2012

  The Benson Hut Ghost

  Billy Morton glanced around him at a veritable sea of faces. They looked...predatory somehow. The silence was becoming uncomfortable. Someone poked him, following it up with, “Come on, dude. Don’t cheap out on us.”

  “My turn, is it?” Billy responded.

  “Nah, some other poor sap’s,” the poker snarked back. “Get on with it.”

  Billy fixed his eyes on the ground. A susurrus of affirmations rose and fell around him—interspersed with catcalls. This crowd could turn ugly fast. Billy had seen it happen before.

  A part of him—his courage—scuttled deep inside. Who the fuck had thought it was a good idea to swap ghost stories in their stranded bus while a storm howled outside, rattling the windows and frosting them with ice crystals.

  “We’re waiting,” another voice called.

  “Not for much longer,” another voice, one with darker undernotes, chimed in.

  Billy’s thoughts jumbled into a wild brew as he struggled against slamming out of the bus and taking his chances in the blizzard. A story—the only ghost story he knew—pounded against the back of his throat urging him to give voice to it.

  No! I can’t tell them about that.

  Why not? Everybody else has been spilling their guts.

  Because I’ve spent the past twenty years trying not to think about it...

  Billy straightened his thin shoulders and ran bony, big-knuckled fingers through his thinning gray-blonde hair. Choking on trepidation, he agonized over how to begin his tale.

  “I’m just going to grab my duffel from one of the overheads. Left my jacket in it, and I’m cold,” he muttered. Heat rose to his bearded cheeks at the half-lie. Oh, he’d left his jacket in the duffel all right, but he didn’t really need it. Shoving his lanky, six-foot frame past a couple of folk, apprehension taunted him as he tried to use the five minutes he’d just bought himself wisely.

  All too soon, he dropped back into his seat, down jacket in tow. In a macabre way, the storm screeching around the bus, where he was stranded with his fellow travelers, created eerie mood music for the story he was about to tell.

  “S-see,” he stammered, swallowed hard, and started over. “This whole thing, it happened just over twenty years ago. I was a young man then...or, younger anyway.” His voice ran down. Crap. If the first two sentences stymied him, how the hell would he ever spit the whole thing out?

  The crowd bent toward him, and he clawed at the neck of his shirt, suddenly feeling as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the bus.

  “I used to be a mountain guide,” Billy said haltingly, still struggling to suck air into his lungs. “That’s how I earned a living until about five years ago when I fell and broke my back. Learned to walk again, but I couldn’t carry a heavy pack anymore. Adjusting to a life that didn’t include long trips into the mountains wasn’t easy. In fact, I had a hell of a time with it. Still do. Uh, sorry, got off track there for a minute.” He ginned up a half-smile, but the faces that stared back at him weren’t buying it.

  “Okay. Okay.” He held both hands out in the universal gesture for surrender. “I give up. See, there’s this place a ways out of Truckee in northern California. It’s a ridge that goes from Mount Lincoln along a high escarpment to a hut on the flanks of Mount Andersen, six miles distant. Been a popular backcountry ski route for years. Folk, they can go from Sugar Bowl resort to Squaw Valley in about a day on skis. If things get rough, well, there’s this old two-story cabin called the Benson Hut round about the mid-way point.

  “Back in the seventies, two guys got lost on that ridge in a storm. One managed to find the hut. His buddy never made it. Not living, anyhow. The one who located the hut spent a long night there writing his so
ul out, first on paper, then on the walls and floors of that hut. Good thing for him he had a wife who called the authorities when he didn’t show up on time. I...well, I was one of the rescue crew. And I saw what he’d done. Guilt and pain and suffering scrawled on every surface. Bothered me so much, I came back there the next summer with a Sierra Club work crew to clean it up.” Billy ground his jaws together, the memories disturbing, unsettling.

  “Sorry. Seems I’m getting off track again.”

  Shrugging apologetically, he cleared his throat. “The one who found the hut lost his boots hunting for his friend and ended up with really bad frostbite. It took us—there were six men and a dog in the Search and Rescue crew—a couple of days to find his buddy. The poor sap froze to death only about two hundred feet away. Storm was so bad he probably never even knew how close he’d been to shelter when he laid himself down in the snow and froze to death. In the end, the dog found him under six feet of snow.

  “Blake, the survivor, just sort of lay on a bunk moaning the whole time we were working. ’Course he couldn’t have helped since he didn’t have boots. We had to get a helicopter in there to get him out, but that’s another story. I heard Blake lost his mind. He kept thinking he heard his buddy calling out to him, even long after he was safe at home.

  “People say that the one who died has haunted Benson Hut ever since. Off and on, there’ve been stories about odd sounds and falling objects. And folk who’d planned to spend the night there have sometimes ended up traveling by headlamp, or moonlight, to put some distance between themselves and that place.”

  Billy swallowed hard. Now that he’d begun, the rest of the story wanted out, and its insistence to be heard unnerved him.

  “There’ve been more in the way of avalanche-related deaths near the hut than there should’ve been too. Fact, there were three just this spring.” Billy hesitated. Nodding to himself, he added, “I, uh, understand about Blake because I had dreams about the dead man myself. Lots of dreams for a lot of years. When we found him, his eyes were open and his hands were stretched out over his body as if he’d been trying to keep the snow from burying him. Yeah, I had dreams, but I convinced myself they were nothing. Never been superstitious, see...”

  Billy paused and shut his eyes. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he picked up his bottle of beer and took a swig. Shrugging, he tilted the bottle back again and killed it.

  That was the easy part. Just wait till I get to what happened to me out there.

  “I’m gonna get another beer,” Billy mumbled, pushing to his feet. “Then I’ll get going again.”

  He rustled through the stack of twelve-packs in the back of the bus and took his time returning to his seat. He could sense the others’ restlessness, and it chilled him worse than his memories.

  They’re worse than predatory. They suck energy from other people’s misery. How the hell did I ever end up with this crowd of losers?

  Picked the wrong bus, I guess...

  They weren’t like this before the bus stalled. Another, darker inner voice said.

  More than suggestion, it held the ring of truth. Billy shuddered. Was something malevolent lurking outside in the storm? Hiding itself in the gale force winds. Had one more thing that fed on darkness come alive?

  Whoa. Stop right there.

  He stared at the beer in his hand, but even if he guzzled it and followed it with several more, it wouldn’t be enough to drive what had happened during that twenty-years-ago storm from his mind.

  “Come on, dude,” someone urged. “Chop. Chop.”

  Billy smothered a desire to throw himself across the aisle and punch the chop-chop guy. He lurched back into his tale.

  “I’ve been past that old hut dozens of times in the years since that man died. Even stayed there a time or two on training expeditions in the summer. Never let myself get taken in by all those stories about the place being haunted and all.”

  He sucked in a tense breath, choking on some saliva.

  “But this time—the time I’m going to tell you about—wasn’t summer. I had a group of four clients, and I was teaching them backcountry ski techniques and avalanche awareness. The whole avalanche thing wasn’t nearly as sophisticated then as it is now. The beacons cut a grid and it took a lot longer...”

  Looking out at the faces, he knew they hadn’t understood him, and he debated whether it was worth a demonstration. Coward! An inner voice taunted him. But the longer he could stave off the inevitable, the better he’d like it.

  “Hey, let me show you,” he said, jumping to his feet, beer bottle clutched in one hand. Wiping the other hand on his faded Levis, he gestured, drawing a square in the air. “With the old beacons, you walked first this way.” He pointed. “Then you’d walk at exactly one hundred eighty degrees off center. When you got close, the lines on your screen would come together...”

  The mumbling rising from the others took on hostile edges, and Billy shut up fast.

  If you pissants don’t like what I have to say, bring out the goddamned hook and pull me off the stage.

  Sitting back in his seat, he chugged half his beer. He was getting a slight buzz, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Not at all, given what was coming.

  “It was January,” he continued, setting the bottle down. “Days were short, and the nights so cold water froze damn near instantly. We’d been out on the ridge most of the day practicing avalanche rescue and different ways to fall and self-arrest with an ice axe. I was getting ready to have everyone put on their skis so we could head back toward Sugar Bowl when one of my clients fell into a bergschrund. That’s a place where the snow’s pulled away from a rock face leaving a hole. In a lot of ways, it’s a lot like a crevasse. Anyhow, it wasn’t a very big ’schrund, so I used it as a learning opportunity for the other three to practice getting her out.

  “I remember looking at the sky right before Beth fell into that hole and thinking maybe the weather was turning, but with all the excitement of having a real rescue to orchestrate, I wasn’t focused on the storm clouds. By the time we’d extricated her, it had started snowing pretty good. Then the wind came up out of nowhere. I tell you, it was blowing like a banshee. Couldn’t see three feet in front of me.

  “Now if it’d happened even ten years ago, I would’ve had a global positioning unit, and maybe we’d have had a chicken’s shot in hell of finding our way back along that ridge. I didn’t have a GPS, though, and the ridge was corniced-up. Since I couldn’t see, it would have been foolhardy to even try to go that way. One false step through that overhanging cornice, and it would’ve been a hundred foot ride down rocky cliffs.”

  He cracked a grim smile. “That means certain death in case any of you might be wondering.”

  Peering out at the folk, he saw a sea of expressionless faces and clamped his jaws together so hard they ached.

  Fuckers! They don’t understand half of what I’m trying to tell ’em. Flatlanders never do.

  Billy thinned his lips into a harsh line and kept talking. “Our only chance was the hut. It was a whole lot closer than Sugar Bowl resort. I didn’t think we were much more than a mile away from it. I’ve always had a fair sense of direction. Good thing too, since I did all my early guiding work with just a map and compass, not all that new-fangled, fancy stuff.

  “Even though I couldn’t see any of them, I recalled where the major landmarks had been before the soup closed in, and I struck off toward where I was sure the Benson Hut would be. Just to be safe, I had us ski roped together. Didn’t want to lose anyone. If someone had slid off the ridge, I’d never have heard their cries in all that howling, shrieking wind. I tell you, it sounded like a living thing, the wind did. Mixed in with it were coyotes. Every once in a while, I heard them crying back and forth to one another like they do. And I knew they were hunting. Gave me the creeps. A pack of coyotes can strip a human body in nothing flat.”

  Billy stopped for another slug of beer. Sour smelling sweat dripped down his sides. He knew that smell all too well.
Fear sweat. It had its own unique aroma, sour and salt mixed together.

  “It was a long mile along that ridge in that hellacious blizzard. Beth and Mary, my two female clients, were so scared they were crying. Every once in a while, I could hear them sobbing when the wind backed off in between gusts. We were losing the light, and that didn’t help. After the first forty minutes or so—yes I was keeping track of the time, that’s an important navigational tool—I thought about stopping to dig a snow cave. But I was afraid we’d all suffocate. The snow was falling at better’n two inches an hour, and it was so fine and powdery, I didn’t think I’d get much traction trying to shape it into any kind of shelter. I stopped to check my compass every ten minutes or so. Had it draped on a cord round my neck, so all I had to do was flick it upright to look at it. Not that it’d matter to you, but I had us heading south-southeast.

  “Then the oddest thing started happening. Off to my left, I saw flickering lights. At first, I figured it must be snow blindness, except my eyes didn’t hurt. It was almost as if those damned lights were trying to lure us off course. When I stopped to check my compass, Mary caught up to me, screaming over the howl of the wind that we needed to go that way as she pointed at the lights.”

  Sighing heavily, Billy snaked his hand toward what was left of his beer.

  “I’m not proud of what I did next,” he said, and then drained the bottle. Taking a shaky breath, he went on, talking more to himself than to the crowd. “I knew she was scared, but that pesky woman was dragging on my arm like she was going to pull me toward those lights—whether I thought it was a good idea or not. I hauled off and slapped her. Couldn’t have hurt much since I had thick mitts on, but she started crying again, and I felt like a son of a bitch. Meantime, Beth, Joe, and Ned had caught up, and we all sort of stood round in a semicircle. I tell you, it took all my persuasive abilities to get them moving again.

  “Long story short, here. I did find the hut. It took us about two hours from where Beth slipped into that ’schrund, but we weren’t moving very fast, mostly because I didn’t want to make any mistakes and, after the first hour, we were traveling by headlamp in full dark.”