Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
“WHAT HAPPENED?” JOHNNY PANTED WHEN he finally reached the girl crumpled in the snow at the base of the boulders. “Are you hurt? Sharise—what happened? Where’s Imani?”
At first, Sharise couldn’t answer because sobs frayed her voice.
She clung to his neck the way she had as a toddler, as if he could lift her up on his shoulders.
Johnny wished he could. He longed for those times—any time but this one.
Chaotic patterns in the snow beyond the boulders revealed that this had been the site of a catastrophe.
He examined Sharise’s shoulders. Checked her neck. No injuries or blood. Johnny scanned the disturbed snow, expecting a river of crimson. But there was none.
What had happened? And how had this happened so fast?
From his distance behind them, he had seen Sharise reach Imani just before Imani had vanished from sight, gone.
Sharise had fired the rifle, a sound that had gutted him with the realization that, once again, he was too far away to help their fight.
He had been running ever since, barely noticing that one of his snowshoes was half untied, dragging behind him as his boot dove into the deep snow.
“I… I…” Sharise hiccupped, trying to speak. She shook her head back and forth so violently that he heard her neck crack.
Johnny held his older daughter’s cheeks, trying to focus her eyes so he wouldn’t have to slap the hysteria out of her. He hated the part of him that wanted to hit her so he could know. “Sharise, tell me—where’s Imani?”
“It took her!” Sharise wailed.
“It’s okay,” Johnny said despite the way that devil’s lie seared him to his core. While the day spun, a more confident man’s voice emerged from his lips; a man who wasn’t so gutted that he was speechless. “We’ll find her. It took her where?”
Sharise pointed to swishing tracks away from the boulders running parallel to the cliff for a few yards. And then the tracks vanished, leaving nothing behind except the thin fog.
“Where, Sharise?” Johnny’s terror and frustration sounded like rage.
She pointed again—this time up toward the craggy cliff. Probably forty feet high and vertical, with no visible way around it. His stomach clenched staring up at the uneven cliff face.
“It went that way, then it climbed up. It moved so fast…”
“Show me, baby,” Johnny said.
Sharise released her tight grip on him, which had crushed the rifle against his shoulder.
Gingerly, he took the rifle she still clung to, although in her distraught state she no longer seemed aware of holding it.
He racked the spent round from the chamber and reloaded.
She had forgotten to do that. Of course she had—she was traumatized, and she’d only had one brief lesson.
He dug into his pocket for a fifth round, since he wanted the gun at full capacity.
Most likely, he would have to fire several times, unless it moved too fast.
Johnny’s mind was ablaze. His thoughts might never have moved so quickly, watching the terrain around them for motion while he tried to calculate a possible passage up the rocks, strategizing on how he could keep Sharise safe while he looked for signs of Imani.
Rapid thinking was his only safeguard against feeling, and a spoonful of feeling would poison him.
“Show me,” he told Sharise again. This time, she nodded and took mincing steps approaching the creature’s trail in the snow toward the cliff, clinging to his elbow, shielding herself behind him.
From the tracks, Johnny guessed that the creature had burst out of a hiding place behind the boulders and taken Imani to its nest, the spot they had heard from the hollow tree.
The tree was distant, but still in sight, so the distance was plausible if there were underground tunnels.
He had never heard of tunnels this close to his grandmother’s property.
“It stopped… here,” Sharise said, sniffling.
Her shaking finger pointed to the spot where the tracks ended, just beneath a nearly flat sheath of rock.
“And then it just moved up so fast. A little this way, a little that way. But it never got to the top. It just… disappeared. Daddy, the way it moved…” Her voice was a husk.
“I know,” Johnny said. “How high up did it get before you couldn’t see it?”
“Maybe… thirty feet? Almost to the top.” A long way up—and a long way down.
Johnny peered up and wasn’t surprised to see Uncle Ricky squatting on the top of the cliff. He wondered if he would always see Uncle Ricky from now on, or if it was only because he had died here. Sharise’s finger was pointing directly toward Uncle Ricky, although she might never know it.
A quick look at the sheer rock face told Johnny he couldn’t replicate the exact journey of the creature. He saw some potential footholds and handholds a little farther down the wall, so he would have to make the climb his own way.
Johnny unhooked his snowshoes, puzzling over what to do about Sharise.
She now embodied her own earlier argument on Imani’s behalf; she was unfit to defend herself.
The climb up wouldn’t be impossible, but they did not go rock climbing as a family.
He had no idea if he had the arm strength to make the climb safely, much less Sharise.
But he couldn’t make this decision for her, he realized.
“What are you going to do?” he asked Sharise, his eyes and voice sober. “Climb up with me? Or go back to the tree?”
Sharise didn’t answer, quivering with sobs. Her eyes looked at him blankly, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Sharise,” he said sharply, and she jumped. “Thirty, forty feet’s a long fall. So… what are you going to do? You come up, or you go to the tree and wait.”
Sharise rubbed her arms, shrinking into her jacket. “I c-can’t go in there,” she whispered. She wasn’t worried about the journey; it was the destination that petrified her.
“Then go to the tree.”
She shook her head. “I’ll watch you climb up. I’ll go up if you fall.”
The man Johnny had been only ten minutes ago would have ordered her to start heading to the tree immediately (It’s not a choice, it’s not a conversation, he vaguely remembered himself saying), since the creature might be preoccupied with Imani. And him.
Johnny almost told Sharise that if she didn’t go hide in the tree, no one might ever know what had happened to their family.
If no one survived to tell their story, they would just become a tragic, unexplained disappearance to feed the legends about Mount Shasta.
But he knew he could never bring those terrible words to his lips, and Sharise would not want to hear them.
Sharise was an adult too this morning, and she had to choose her own way. Besides, she was right. If he fell and was even knocked unconscious, she would need the gun. She would have to try to find Imani.
Johnny hugged Sharisse and kissed the top of her helmet. His pride in her and Imani only made him feel more wretched. They deserved more than this.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “It’s not your fault. You did everything you could.”
He might have been addressing either one of them.
From the way Sharise’s face wrenched in sorrow, she didn’t believe him.
But he didn’t have time to minister to her guilt, or his own.
If he had agreed to come here to look for Tasha the way Imani wanted to—the way he’d always known he should—he would have been able to protect Imani.
“Do you think Imani was still alive?” he whispered.
Sharise nodded. “She was yelling. Probably cussing it out.”
Johnny gave a sour chuckle. Hope almost shattered the wall damming his emotions. He nodded and squeezed Sharise’s shoulder, refusing to entertain tears. “I’ll find her,” he promised. “I’ll find both of them.”
“Be careful,” she said, a plea.
He nodded, but he had run out of words. He had waited too long already.
Johnny surveyed the cliff face and raised his foot to the first jutting rock, about three feet from the ground. His foot slipped immediately, and his shoulder bumped against the wall. Hard. Sharise gave a startled gasp. He felt a sick certainty that he had already failed.
“That’s too icy!” Uncle Ricky called down. “Move over a ways.”
“Dad—try over there!” Sharise said. She was pointing to the same spot as Uncle Ricky. They’d shared the same thought, or maybe she could hear him without knowing.
Johnny took a few more steps along the edge of the cliff, watching the patterns of outcroppings and small ledges that might take him closer to the top, where Imani had disappeared.
He spotted an approach that might work, almost a replication of the monster’s natural movement—one way a bit, then the other way, gradually moving higher.
“That’s it,” Uncle Ricky agreed. “That’s the way.”
Johnny reached up for the thin ledge two feet above him, curling his bare fingers tightly around the stone at the same time he hoisted his foot up on a lower ledge left of it.
His numbing fingertips felt scorched on the rock as he pulled himself up.
He thought about asking Sharise for his right-hand glove back, but instinct told him that he needed to feel every inch of these rocks.
He pulled off his left glove and tossed it down.
He was only two feet off the ground and felt like he could fall and break his neck.
He angled his hip to hike his boot up to the next highest ledge, which was narrower.
He reached for a higher handhold closest to his left hand this time, and those warmer fingers felt more nimble and secure, without pain.
Whenever possible, he would rely on his warmer left hand, he decided.
Johnny was so focused on his fingers that he got careless with his left foot, which scrabbled for purchase with a couple of sliding kicks that made the rifle bump against his back on its strap and nearly sent him back down to start again. But he held on with both hands.