CHAPTER 18
WHAT HIDES BEHIND
The melodic whistle stopped abruptly and was replaced by the sound of wind lashing the crowns of the giant pines.
The white fog coming down off the Sierra Nevada swallowed the camp of the dead Russians, reducing the world of the three renegades to a circle of five metres of visibility.
Nero’s black stallion lurched backward, almost tearing the reins out of the hunter’s gloved hand.
The animals were not looking at the sky; they were looking to the sides.
They knew, by pure survival instinct, that death was not coming from above.
It was walking among the trunks. Elena spun quickly, raising the double-barrelled pistol toward a pine on the right.
She would have sworn she saw a lean silhouette, far too tall for a man, draw back behind the thick bark of the tree in the exact millisecond her eyes focused there.
“There!” she shouted, the shot from her gun echoing off the mountain like thunder.
The heavy lead ball tore an immense piece of bark and wood out of the trunk, but behind it there was nothing except empty snow.
The snap of a breaking branch echoed immediately to their left.
Gideon swung around with the rotating gun mounted on the horse, but the ten steel barrels found only emptiness.
It made no difference where they looked. The thing was too fast. Too lean.
It moved in the blind spot of the human eye, using the thickness of the pine trunks to hide itself with every blink. It was the invisible predator of that forest.
What Hides Behind
“Elena, stop wasting lead!” Gideon burst out, his cold sweat freezing on his forehead.
“That damned thing is playing with us! It wants us to spend our ammunition before it opens our bellies the way it did the Russians!” A rough whisper, imitating Elena’s curt voice perfectly, echoed from behind a trunk less than three metres from Nero:
“Go take a bath, you stinking thing…”
The repetition of the words Elena had said to Nero the night before in Bitter Creek turned the vaquera’s stomach over.
The monster was not merely hunting them; it was absorbing what they said, mimicking the human voice with a warped, mechanical, soulless cadence.
Nero did not flinch. Under the brim of his hat his glacial blue eyes tracked the ground.
In the fresh snow a new long print with deep claws had appeared directly behind the pack horse.
The monster had been inches from the rotating reaper while they were all looking the other way.
“It doesn’t want us to spend ammunition, Gideon,” Nero said, his voice incredibly calm and measured, the heavy canvas duster stirring in the wind. “It’s only waiting for us to turn our backs.”
In that same instant a pair of long grey claws, sharp as a butcher’s razors, came out from behind the trunk where Elena’s horse was tied.
With one silent upward movement the thing gutted the animal.
The horse let out a whinny of pure agony and collapsed into the snow, staining the whiteness of the ground with a jet of boiling blood.
The Iron Curtain
Through the fog, for a fraction of a second, they saw the creature.
It was a skeletal abomination, its ashen skin stretched over the bones, with long arms that nearly touched the ground and eyes that shone with a sickly yellow luminescence.
Before Elena could pull the trigger, the beast simply vanished behind another pine, as though it had fused itself into the wood.
“Gideon!” Nero’s voice rose a tone, as cutting as the cold of the Sierra Nevada. “Forget aiming.”
“What?” the inventor shouted, panicking.
“There’s no aiming at a thing that never stays in front of you.” Nero walked with firm steps to the pack horse’s flank, pushing Gideon aside and taking control of the bronze crank of the rotating reaper.
He released the lateral pivot.
“We’re going to bring the forest down.”
Nero aimed the ten steel barrels not at any particular trunk but at the whole line of pines surrounding the camp.
The hunter turned the crank with brutal force.
The rotating reaper roared again on the mountain, but this time the sound was continuous, deafening, spitting an unbroken torrent of .
44 calibre balls. Nero swept the arc of trees in a slow and merciless back-and-forth motion.
The devastating impact of hundreds of bullets a minute began to shatter the forest. The trunks of the giant pines started bursting into thousands of splinters of wood and ice.
Immense limbs came down out of the heights, crushing the ground.
Gideon’s machine gun worked like a mechanical scythe, eliminating every possible hiding place within the diameter of the camp.
Suddenly, in the midst of the noise of the shooting and the breaking trees, a high, purely inhuman scream echoed through the snow.
The reaper’s invisible line of lead had caught the thing in the middle of a leap between two trunks.
A trail of dark thick blood, boiling and steaming where it touched the cold snow, sprayed into the air.
The creature dropped heavily onto the frozen ground and rolled down into a dark gorge on the left, howling with pain while the echo of its flight was lost in the immensity of the mountain.
The Price of the Climb
Nero let go of the crank. The carousel of ten barrels breathed out a dense smoke and smelled of burnt whale oil.
Around them the scene looked like the end of the world: a devastated clearing full of trunks cut half through and splinters of wood drifting in the fog.
Elena was on her knees beside her dead horse, quickly stripping off the holsters and the supplies left in the animal’s saddle.
She looked at Nero, her face pale with shock but her jaw set.
“The lead hurt that thing, but it’s still alive down there,” the vaquera said, standing and throwing the saddlebags over Gideon’s pack horse. “And I’m on foot.”
Gideon was looking at the ruined pines, swallowing hard, realizing that his engineering had just saved their lives for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.
“We can’t stop, not even to breathe,” Nero pronounced, wiping off the black blood of the monster that had spattered his duster.
He drew the black stallion’s reins, pointing toward the descent of the mountain that showed itself beyond the ruined clearing.
“The creature knows what we are now. And the Russians down below certainly heard that noise. The quiet is over.”
These were not rough fur hunters this time.
They were infantry soldiers of the Russian-American Company.
They wore heavy military uniforms of olive-green wool and clean high leather boots, and they carried long Berdan rifles on their shoulders with fixed bayonets that gleamed in the gloom of the forest. There were four men.
Two of them sat around a small fire, talking in a rough, guttural dialect and laughing quietly as they shared a bottle of dark glass.
The third was cleaning the hooves of a horse tied to a post, and the fourth — clearly the officer or the group’s scout — stood on a rock, looking up at the top of the mountain through a brass spyglass.
“They heard the reaper up there…” Elena’s voice came as a whisper right beside Nero’s ear. She had slipped in behind him, her eyes shining with hatred at the sight of the Russian uniforms.
“Yes,” Nero murmured, without taking his eyes off the officer. “They’re waiting for the fur hunters to come down with news. They don’t know the hunters became the monster’s banquet.”
“What do we do?” Gideon whispered from further back, holding a heavy wrench as though it were a club, his face pale with nerves. “If they raise the alarm, the fort will know we’re coming.”
Nero weighed the situation with the speed of a man who has already survived a hundred gunfights.
There were four military horses there, fresh mounts that would solve the problem of Elena being on foot.
And, more importantly, the officer on the rock had maps or marching orders that would reveal the exact defences of Fort Ross.
“We’re not using the machine gun,” Nero pronounced, drawing both modified Colt Patersons from their holsters with perfectly synchronized and silent movements. “The noise of that lead travels much too far in this fog. Elena, take the one at the picket line. Gideon, stay with the horses.”
“And the other three?” Elena asked, a cruel smile surfacing on her cracked lips.
“They’re mine,” the hunter answered.