“Then we are going to have a serious disagreement.”
Behind Nico, Jordan swore quietly. The tall youth had made his way to the window and he squinted down through the gaps in the shutters.
“Shit. There’s something else further down the street, something… Oh shit, it’s one of those things, it’s one of—”
Hanna grabbed the front of Charlie’s coat and pulled him to the floor. Then she slid up, to the crack of the shutters, a flicker of curiosity in her grey eyes. “Get down! All of you! And switch off that lantern. You can’t help him now!”
Nico numbly slid down to his knees. A sound rose above the storm. A voice. First begging, then screaming.
Soon there was just the wind.
Hanna still kneeled by the boarded-up windows, her eyes level with the first of the cracks.
Nico peered at her from where he shivered on his knees. She had the look of a hunter, someone watching the movements of their prey before they prepared to lift their rifle and take a shot. Something about her curious demeanour made Nico wonder what else Hanna knew, and if there were things she wasn’t willing to share with the other survivors.
After a while she glanced at him, shook her head slowly from side to side and slid down to join the others on the floor.
“Everybody get as far away from the window as you can. And if you want to last the night, don’t make a sound.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Shiv wanted to die.
She had lost the feeling in her fingers and toes hours earlier, and now her nose and the rest of her face felt lifeless and numb. Hanna had told them that they’d be dead in less than an hour out in the storm without shelter.
But she had been wrong, on that count if nothing else.
Shiv had frostbite, for sure, and if somebody was to miraculously turn up now and rescue her out of the blue she was pretty certain that she’d be living out the rest of her days with no fingers, no toes and just a gap where her nose had been.
But she wasn’t dead, not yet.
Something kept Shiv alive. It might have been the sight of the figures that crept and danced in the blizzard just an arm’s length away from her, jagged teeth clamping open and shut convulsively.
Or maybe it was Ryan.
Just beyond the figures, Ryan’s clear blue eyes stared glassily at her. The thing that had killed him crouched on his chest, a clutch of flesh and entrails dangling like spaghetti from its mouth, a slick of blood down its chin. Its dark eyes slid towards Shiv as it ate, pupils swimming with hunger and hatred.
At the hotel, Shiv hadn’t really caught a glimpse of the creatures that had crashed through the windows and taken her friends, not up close. She had caught flickers, shapes, but without her glasses they had been blurred, indistinct. Now, by the sliver of moonlight that fought its way through the clouds and snow, she saw it all.
When they had first heard the howls in the cramped confines of the lift station, Shiv and the others had made a desperate break for it. They hadn’t got far. Malachi had been barely a dozen metres from the door of the lift hut before he’d tumbled over into the deep snow.
And then they were on him.
Shiv had chanced a quick look back, and seen Malachi on his front in the snow, a thin, pale-faced figure pinning him down. Curled, dirty fingernails were reaching for his neck. Malachi hadn’t even had time to beg.
Ryan and Shiv had made it a little further. Shiv had been panting, Ryan swearing, both of them committed to getting down the mountain and as far away from the lift station as they could.
They’d both fallen around the same time, their skis sinking into the snow and their bodies tumbling down the slope with the momentum of their descent. The only difference had been that Shiv had slid and rolled a little bit further than Ryan. And that had been what had saved her.
She had heard a loud crack as a hidden rock brought her to a sudden halt, and then a heartbeat later she had felt a massive jolt of pain in her lower leg. After that she’d passed out.
It was minutes later when she had woken up. She knew it hadn’t been long because Ryan had still been breathing as the creatures tore into him. She’d watched the light fade from his eyes as his blood seeped into the snow. Then there was just her, and the things that had slaughtered all her friends.
Her leg was broken. There was no question. When she tried to struggle further down the slope, the fierce agony from the movement of her leg made her scream, almost pulling her down into darkness. After a while, she stopped trying to struggle. The cold of the snow seeping through her clothes lessened the pain, numbing her.
At first, Shiv couldn’t understand why the creatures didn’t just fall on her like they had Malachi and Ryan. After a while, she thought they might be playing with her, like a cat plays with a mouse, savouring the kill. They hovered, metres away, five or six of them, watching her hungrily.
Some time after midnight, she came to realize that it was as if someone had drawn an invisible line in the snow, one the creatures couldn’t cross. She knew they wanted her, the longing in their eyes and the way that their jagged nails stretched towards her was proof of that. But something stopped them from getting any nearer to her. They growled and reached, snapped and slavered, but it seemed to Shiv as if an unseen wall blocked their path to her.
All Shiv could do was watch and wait. And somehow that was worse than what had happened to Malachi and Ryan.
At least they hadn’t had time to think about what was about to happen, to analyze it, predict it, imagine the claws and teeth tearing into their flesh. As Shiv sat and shivered and stared, she realized there were two scenarios. In one, she froze to death. In the other, the things somehow found a way to get to her, at her, and they ripped her apart like they had the boys. As she sobbed, her tears solidified on her cheeks like candlewax.
She had been glad of the dark and what she couldn’t see, but as dawn approached that changed. The storm lessened, the wind died and light started to creep into the world. The creatures turned from shadows of black and grey into clear, visible figures.
The one that had killed Ryan was the worst. It sat atop its victim’s back like an unholy vulture, its bloody claws toying with the ravaged hole in Ryan’s coat.
It had once been a man, of that Shiv was fairly sure, but something had happened to it, changed it somehow. Its face was pale and strangely misshapen, framed by a thatch of wild inky hair. Two black, baleful eyes bored into Shiv from under a heavy, angular brow. There was something shark-like about its face, an impression that Shiv realized was made so much worse by its wide, fanged, ghastly mouth. Pieces of Ryan’s flesh glistened wet and grisly in the half-light, and her friend’s blood ran down the creature’s chin on to its tattered green jumper, the kind of thing that an army officer might have worn years before. Ragged bandages covered its hands and its feet, and they flapped and jigged in the wind.
They sat there like that, staring at each other, while other figures danced tantalisingly close to Shiv, reaching for her. Sometimes Shiv slipped asleep, a tiny part of her mind hoping that she would never wake up.
But each time, she did.
Finally, as a tiny ray of light started to illuminate the mountaintop above her, the creatures started to move, backing away into the shadows, dragging Ryan’s corpse behind them.
It was only as the first fingers of sunlight danced upon the distant peaks that Shiv felt her eyes close one last time, a blanket of exhaustion slipping over her with a welcome finality.
Chapter Twenty-three
Hanna stared at the ravaged engine, her hope slipping away with her dissipating breath.
It had been a mistake to stay in Kaldgellan.
Hanna had realized it hours before, when the creatures outside the shuttered window had torn apart the boy on the street with a lustful, terrible precision. Whatever they were, whatever Hanna thought she might find out by staying, the time had come to run.
But it seemed that was no longer an option.
They
had awoken to a clear sky and no wind. It had tasted like salvation. But within an hour the heavens had turned a sickly, purple hue, a steady trickle of snow starting to fall. It was growing heavier by the minute.
It was just after nine and already the breeze was starting to pick up, a cold, gusting bite that sliced through their clothes.
“Is it fixable?”
Hanna glanced towards Charlie, and gave up trying to mask the anger on her face. She swore, slammed the metal cover back down and stepped away from the snowmobile.
“Scheisse! It’s a waste of time. They’re all the same. The lifts. The pisters. Every bike and tractor we’ve come across. The engines have been damaged, torn, shredded, the wires ripped out. It would take days to fix them, if they could be fixed at all. They know we’re still here, somewhere. They knew we’d try to run. And they made sure we couldn’t.”
Charlie nodded and stared up disconsolately at the sky. Hanna had spent enough time in the mountains to know that the clouds up there were brimming with snow. There was no way they would be getting down to the valley today.
She felt Charlie’s eyes studying her, his voice calm, conciliatory. “So what do we do?”
Hanna reached down and picked up her metal stick from the snow. Before she could stop herself, she let out a shriek of frustration and rage and smashed the end down into the hood of the snowmobile again and again, denting and creasing the metal.
She wasn’t sure how long it was before she grew tired of taking her frustrations out on the sled. The sound of her anguish echoed around the empty streets, the noise slowly lessening with each impact. It was a dozen hits before Hanna backed away from the bike, her breath coming in quick gasps. She swore, threw the hockey stick down into the snow and found Charlie staring at her.
“So what do we do? You want to know? What can we do? They know we’re still here. They‘re not going to let us go. They’re going to kill us. All of us. We got lucky last night. It can’t last. On the way over here I saw some new damage to the chalets and houses in the village. Doors wrenched open, windows smashed. You know what I think? Those things are searching for us, once it goes dark. And tonight they’re going to find us.”
Hanna stared up at the sky, and screamed into the falling snow. “Scheisse!”
She turned towards the forests and trees that loomed by the lift station, and started to shout in their direction. “Come on out, you bastards! I know you’re there! Come out here in the light, don’t make us wait! Do it now! Come on!”
Nothing moved except the flicker of the branches in the wind. The two of them had spent their morning darting from lift station to bike to hut, hiding in shadows and doorways where they could. But any thoughts of subterfuge had fled from Hanna when she began her frantic assault on the snowmobile.
Charlie bent down and picked up Hanna’s hockey stick. He stared at Hanna for a moment then reached out for her hand. When she hesitated, Charlie nodded in the direction of an old, grizzled bar across the street and reached out for her again.
She didn’t know what he had in mind, but she took his fingers all the same, blinded by a sudden wave of fatigue and hopelessness.
The entrance to the bar was latched, a few feet of snow piled against the wood down by their feet, but when Charlie tried the door it groaned open. He pushed at the gnarled wood gently then stepped inside, glancing around the darkened room. A stink of smoke, stale beer and damp drifted to Hanna’s nostrils. But apart from glistening patches of broken glass on the floor and a few overturned chairs, the place was empty and still.
Charlie gestured at a worn sofa by the entrance. Hanna had barely slept the night before, and the scuffed leather felt soft and welcoming as she parked herself down.
She watched as Charlie walked over to the bar, took down two small glasses, then turned and scrutinized the bottles that lined the far wall. He hesitated for a moment, took one of the spirits down, and poured what was probably far too much into both glasses. Then he made his way back round the bar towards Hanna. She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“Trying to get me drunk?”
Charlie shook his head and put a glass in front of her. “When we lived by the sea my dad used to come home sometimes from one of his shifts, when he was out on the lifeboats, and if he’d had a bad one he’d pour himself a big glass of whatever we had in the house. Sometimes he told me they’d been too late and they’d had to fish bodies out of the sea. I think it got to him, though he never showed it. But he said a drink was good. Said it got rid of the shakes. I always remember him saying that. I wouldn’t really know whisky from gin, but Stefan brought us in here on the first day, had one of these after a day’s skiing. And it seemed to do the job for him.”
Hanna glanced at Charlie warily, then reached out and picked up the glass.
“To Stefan, then. Prost!”
She took a long, deep gulp, then coughed and shook her head. The alcohol tasted sharp and bitter, but even though it burned Hanna all the way down, she felt a little of her fatigue and anger fade away in a burst of warmth.
Hanna felt a smile tug at her lips. “Stefan always did have the poorest taste in alcohol.”
She stared at Charlie and nodded down at his drink. He hacked and coughed as he swallowed, but he downed it all the same, then glanced cautiously up at Hanna. “So were you and Stefan…?”
Hanna shook her head at the question. “No. Never. He wanted to, but he wasn’t my type. Too selbstgefallig, too … smug? Liked himself too much. A nice guy, but not for me.”
She fell silent, her eyes wandering around at the faded walls of the pub.
“He was like me, though, an outsider. I grew up here but moved away when I was little. And Stefan used to come here as a child for holidays, but he came back here to work whenever he had breaks from university. I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe any of this.”
She fell silent for a moment, then picked up her glass and held it up to the light. “You were right. My shakes have gone already. To your father. Prost.”
She took a fresh hit from her drink, felt her face twist into a grimace, and finished off the little that was left before giving Charlie a curious look. “But I’m not the only one who’s an outsider. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the rest of those from your school don’t trust you. And the angry one, Jordan, he keeps referring to you as a criminal. You going to tell me why?”
Charlie’s face reddened and Hanna found herself noticing, not for the first time, how there was something about him, something edgily attractive. Hanna became aware that she was staring and she quickly averted her eyes, leaning back in her chair and moving her attention to a photograph of the mountain that sat above Charlie’s head on the faded wall. A handful of tiny figures stood on a deserted piste in the black and white picture. Charlie’s words dragged her back to the tatty lounge.
“You said if we made it through the night you’d tell me what happened to your brother.”
Hanna felt the warm glow of alcohol slip away. “And I thought you just wanted to sit here and get drunk with me.”
She took a deep breath. “If you want to hear about Jon, you’re going to have to pour us another drink. We both know we’re not getting out of Kaldgellan, not today anyway. I’m going to go back to the hotel after this and I’m going to close my eyes for a while. I’m out of ideas. I’m exhausted. And another drink might just help me sleep.”
Charlie nodded and made his way to the bar. He looked unsteady on his feet, but he managed to pour them both another glass.
Hanna studied him as he sat down. She had no desire to tell her story, but neither did she want to go out into the storm, or back to the ominous silence of the decaying hostel. And she found herself wanting to know more about the haunted young man that somehow reminded her so much of herself.
“OK, so I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you about my brother if you tell me why they call you a criminal. And what happened to your father. I’m no genius, but the look on your face wh
en you talk about him reminds me of how I feel when I think about Jon. We have a deal?”
Charlie held her eyes for a moment and shrugged. “OK, whatever. It’s not the most exciting of stories, but I’ll tell you if you really want to know.”
Hanna glanced over her shoulder, towards the door. The snow was much heavier again outside, the wind thudding against the door. She rose from the sofa, latched the door gently then sat back down. Thin beams of light shone in through the bars on the windows, illuminating the dancing motes of dust.
“We can’t stay here too long. But right now there’s nowhere else we need to be.”
Charlie nodded and Hanna took a quick swig of her drink, fought back a cough and slipped back into the past.
“Jon loved this shitty little village. We grew up here then moved away nearer to Innsbruck when I was five or six. You know Kaldgellan by now. You’ve seen it all, I think. There’s not a lot to see. There’s nothing here but snow in the winter, grass in the summer. I was glad to get away from here, to somewhere with a little bit of life in it. But Jon missed this place. He said he felt like life was simpler here. When he was seventeen, he found some work in one of the valleys nearby. Taking experienced skiers on the slopes in the winter, doing tours and hiking in the summer. He loved it. He was much older than me, and a real … free spirit. The last time I saw him was at Christmas, a decade ago now. I’d just started attending a boarding school near the city, and I couldn’t wait to get home for the holidays and see him. We went ice skating in Innsbruck, visited the Christmas markets. Touristy stuff but so special.”
She paused and licked her lips, then took another sip of her drink. Outside, a gust of wind sent snow billowing down the street like a sandstorm. Hanna looked out of the barred window and shivered.
“I was back at school when my parents came to tell me the news. Jon had been in the west of the valley, at another peak a mile or two from here, taking a school party off-piste. He was an excellent guide, careful, steady, an outstanding skier. It still doesn’t make sense to me. An avalanche, they said. Killed all twelve students he was with, Jon as well. Swept them right down the mountain. Tore them apart. He was eighteen, a year older than I am now. By the time my parents and I made it out here, it was all over. We had a small service then I went back to school. My parents, they never really got over it.”
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