Chapter Twenty-Five #2
Outside. The road. (You always knew it was about the road.)
“Why don’t you go outside and find out?” Uncle Ricky said.
Outside was no better than inside, memory-wise.
The driveway was empty. No minivan, no RAV. Johnny guessed it was about eight in the morning, judging from the gray sky, but it was hard to place the sun because of thick, rippled clouds. Snow clouds, Uncle Ricky had called them long ago. But it wasn’t snowing now.
The cold slapped Johnny with alertness. He didn’t turn around to see if Uncle Ricky had followed him outside, since alertness made him certain Uncle Ricky had never been there. The cold helped stave off his dizziness so he could walk down the porch steps without falling.
“Tasha!” he called. “Sharise! Imani!”
Was utter silence natural in the woods? The deep quiet felt ominous. No signs of life. The only thing he knew for certain was that he wasn’t supposed to be alone.
“What the fuck?” Johnny whispered.
Johnny’s earlier tears were turning to ice, tugging at his eyelids.
Everything went blurry when his left eye sealed shut, and he quickly wiped the frost away, but gently, so he wouldn’t lose that contact too.
Johnny could barely see the E on an eye chart without his contacts, so he would be useless without it.
Johnny always slept with at least one contact in to avoid immersive blindness from the moment he first woke up. He hated that lost feeling.
Like this. Like he was lost now.
Johnny wanted to believe that Tasha and the girls had taken the RAV while he was sleeping—(“Sleeping”?
That what you’re still calling it?)—but the note had mentioned a trail.
The ski trail? Johnny was tempted to veer toward the rear of the house to survey the trail, but the open gate at the end of the driveway captured his attention instead—and the white Jeep half-hidden by trees outside of his fence.
Something about that Jeep made Johnny’s veins wither.
His legs carried him on their own, his sore leg propelling him like he was being pulled on a leash as he ran toward the road. (You had your gun before, remember? And you had it for a reason.) As he loped closer to the Jeep, a sound he did not recognize burbled in his chest.
The RAV’s front tires dipped sharply into the embankment farther down the road. He’d had an accident! But where was his family? For five steps, six steps, Johnny did not let himself know. He called out, expecting to find his family injured.
But the RAV was empty. The passenger door stood wide-open, jammed into the embankment’s snowy brush. The door yawning open tore a hole in Johnny’s blizzard of not knowing, and he reeled from an assault of images.
This door flinging open—snow flying into the car—no, not snow, a living beast with monstrous teeth and bat-like flaps—Tasha swallowed inside the veiny white flaps—Tasha’s legs kicking—Tasha screaming—Tasha dragged down the road so fast—too fast.
Tasha. Gone.
The weight of remembering toppled him from his feet and snuffed out his breath.
Johnny’s knees roiled with new pain as he collapsed down to the snow, hard.
He had no oxygen to fuel the shriek trying to claw from his throat, but he heaved with his effort.
He needed to expel the anguish or be devoured.
Finally, Johnny’s howl rose to the treetops, wild.
An hour might have passed. Or five minutes. Johnny sobbed and shrieked.
The dizziness returned because he was on the verge of hyperventilating, and he would gladly have succumbed to fainting, or dying, but remembering the nine words made him fight for his breath. We’re following the trail to find Mom. Get help!!!
Tasha was gone, but his children needed him to fight off his shock.
“What trail?” Johnny whispered from the tatters of his throat. No imaginary voice or hallucination appeared to help him understand this time, the cost of alertness.
Finally, he stared down at the snow. He remembered the strange swishing pattern that had intrigued him from his first visit to his grandmother’s lodge…
and there it was! A much larger version of the zigzagging ruts appeared near the stalled car and traveled to the front gate and beyond.
It was as if the creature he had glimpsed in Mazelle’s window had been immature, a runt, and now he had met its mother.
Or it was all grown up. Or there was a pack of them.
From where he was kneeling beside the RAV, Johnny saw that the snow had preserved his size-twelve footprints running on the road to chase Tasha.
Imani and Sharise also had left twin footprints alongside the creature’s trail, sometimes crossing it.
Those touching trails made him imagine a clash between the creature and his children, but there was no blood.
Get help, they’d said.
Johnny felt his back pocket, where he usually kept his cell phone.
It was still there, the screen webbed with new cracks.
The screen’s light glowed on when he triggered the facial recognition, and his breath caught with hope.
His battery was nearly full. But instead of the SOS he’d seen at the gas station in McCloud, the space for the signal bars was a blank line. Dead.
And the RAV was a lost cause, in need of a tow. The Jeep might start up, but could he risk that twenty-minute drive? Did they have that long?
Yelling with resolve, Johnny pulled himself back to his feet by tugging on the RAV’s rear bumper.
Both of his knees screamed at him, banged up and frigid, his jeans now damp from the snow.
What he needed was his rifle, but Mazelle’s old Winchester wasn’t in sight.
He considered searching for it, but he felt sure that his daughters had taken it, especially Imani.
Johnny patted his lower zippered jacket pocket and was relieved to feel the box of .
30-30 rifle rounds zippered inside. He had only fired once, so the rifle might have up to four rounds left, if it had been fully loaded.
Uncle Ricky had told him he had five shots, but he’d had to eject the cartridge each time.
Would Sharise or Imani know how to reload before firing again?
Imani had asked for hunting lessons, but he had avoided that conversation once they’d arrived at the lodge.
After everything that had happened—the mess in the kitchen, the thing tracking him outside that forced them to sleep huddled in the living room—why hadn’t it dawned on him to teach them everything he knew about the gun?
He didn’t have time to get help. He was their help.
When his vision blurred again, Johnny tugged the bandage across his forehead down to cover his right eye, a makeshift patch.
There. Much better. No more cycling in and out of white blurriness.
If he had been thinking more clearly, Johnny might have found his duffel bag and replaced his missing contact lens.
Or considered that a helicopter and experienced search and rescue might find Sharise and Imani faster than he could no matter how long his drive to town.
Instead, Johnny’s thoughts were solely anchored to the trail.
The snow was displaced where he had fallen.
He saw the tracks from Sharise and Imani dragging him into the lodge with the blanket, which had made a deeper indentation beside their footprints.
(That quick thinking probably had saved his life, he realized.
And under so much duress? If he weren’t so shaken, Johnny would have been full of nothing but pride.)
But their trail ended at the front porch.
Instead of going to the porch, Johnny picked up the trail of the beast he had been tracking for nearly fifty years, mostly in his nightmares.
These ruts diverted from his daughters’ footprints after the driveway, swishing directly toward the ski trail instead of the porch.
He recognized this monster’s tracks as clearly as he had when he was thirteen.
Tasha, he reminded himself. These erratic swishes were Tasha’s trail.
He expected to see blood, but not a single spray or drop stained the snow.
(Not yet.) Johnny gritted his teeth to fend off his most despairing thoughts, because despair turned his muscles to sand.
He rushed to the top of the ski run, where his daughters’ footprints reappeared. They had come back outside. And then…
Three sets of lines were carved into the strip of snow below: the monster’s erratic path and the more elegant swoops of his daughters’ snowboards.
“You went after her,” he said, voice flat with awe. Sharise’s note had told him their plan, and the evidence of their pursuit both uplifted and terrified him. “You fucking went after her.”