Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
MOMENTS EARLIER
KEEP GOING. TURN BACK. KEEP going. Turn back. Left foot. Right foot.
Johnny’s feet were at war with themselves, at war with the snow.
Pure stubbornness had kept him on the trail when the snow began, dimming his hopes of finding his family.
Twenty minutes later, the patterns he followed were mere ghost tracks, vanishing and reappearing, a maddening peekaboo beneath falling flakes.
In truth, he was guessing more than tracking.
The lines had faded almost beyond recognition for the past thirty strides, probably more if he had been counting his steps.
But his head didn’t have room for counting with the war raging within.
He should have gone back. He knew that now. But his feet still plowed ahead.
Johnny’s only luck manifested when he reached the next stand of pines—at least he thought the tracks were leading him there—and he saw that the tree cover preserved more evidence of the tracks.
Two distinct sets of footprints congregated at a large snowdrift strewn across several pine trunks like a wall.
The new snowfall hadn’t covered large holes in the snowdrift that Johnny told himself might have been the girls looking for Tasha. Or looking for the monster.
Was there blood? Johnny jabbed at the snowdrift with his ski pole and swept the softer snow aside, searching for anything like the blood streaks in Imani’s footage from the deer’s head, or what he’d seen under the unlucky Jeep parked in front of the lodge.
“No blood,” he whispered aloud, so grateful that he wanted to sink to his knees.
But he wanted to sink to his knees, period, gratitude or not.
Johnny had never been so weary. He had run a marathon in his thirties, but although he had limped the final stretch and barely been able to walk for days, his muscles hadn’t felt sodden with the dread and memories he carried now.
His feet, his legs, had turned to stone.
But rediscovering his daughters’ trail filled Johnny with new vigor. This wasn’t his daughters’ burial mound, the end of his journey—the end of everything. He still had a chance.
Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. His thoughts clanged, urgent.
A rifle shot pealed from somewhere north of him and then floated everywhere with an ethereal call-and-response. Despite the distance, the sound vibrated through him.
Was it a hunter? Or could Imani and Sharise have mastered the rifle on their own? Johnny’s jubilation at his daughters’ resourcefulness was quickly swallowed by his terror at their likely target. Had they found the monster, or had the monster found them?
Johnny’s mouth sucked itself dry in the next few endless seconds, and old words from the church school group Mom had made him attend in elementary school came to him, when he had delivered the devastating line in front of the congregation, his arms splayed out on a papier-maché cross: It is finished. Christ’s last words at Calvary.
But it wasn’t finished. A second rifle shot exploded across the mountain’s woods, valleys, and cliff faces. One shot might be an ambush—but two was an ongoing battle.
“Imani! Sharise!” Johnny shouted in a voice they would not have recognized. Stripped.
The second shot felt more desperate than the first, proof that they needed him. He’d fired that rifle once and they had fired twice, and they were either out of rounds or close to it. He had the box of fresh rounds in his pocket, a million miles away. Johnny choked back a sob.
He searched for more tracks beyond the long snowdrift, and apparently the girls had climbed back on their boards.
Their footprints disappeared and became snowboard tracks again, winding through the pine grove in patterns that grew more faint, then less faint, depending on the tree cover from the evergreens. But he could still follow them.
Johnny tripped over his snowshoes, nearly breaking his wrist when he thrust out his hands to stop his fall.
Electric pain jittered up his left arm, but he barely noticed.
Running was useless in snowshoes, but his feet picked up speed on their own.
His left arm radiated so much pain now that he wanted to clasp it tight. Breathing was painful gulps of fire.
(Johnny Gage here, Rampart—victim is showing signs of a cardiac episode.)
“I’m coming!” Johnny shouted to his daughters, and then, since they apparently were entwined, he screamed out to the monster itself: “Leave them alone! Take me!”
Maybe he could draw the monster away. Dear God, was there a chance?
Johnny shouted and begged until he was dizzy and his chest hurt too much to speak.
Johnny Washington didn’t know it, but Sharise and Imani were beyond the sound of his voice, which was muted in the snow.
They never heard their father’s calls.
The tree’s hollow grew more promising with every step on the slight uphill incline.
Imani and Sharise hiked their way up the bluff as if the trunk’s shadowed interior offered passage to the Underground Railroad.
A protruding bark ledge over the hollow vaguely resembled a puckered lip, almost like the open mouth in Candyman.
The opening was narrow at the top and bottom, but widened to two feet at the middle.
The wide area was maybe two feet high. Barely big enough.
Imani squatted to stare inside with the help of the camping flashlight she found in her backpack. The tree was hollow all the way through. Inside, it had so much space that one of them might even be able to lie down while the other sat watch. But the entrance was narrow.
Imani was sure she could squeeze through, but could Sharise?
“What’s in there?” Sharise asked.
“It’s empty,” Imani reported, nearly breathless. “Just twigs and pine cones and stuff.”
It would only occur to Imani later that the arrangement of twigs at the rear of the hollow looked more like a nest than random debris.
This tree, so isolated from the pines, would not have collected so many thin pine twigs on its own.
But in that moment, Imani was most struck by the generous size of the shelter. If they could get in.
“Can you fit?” Imani asked.
Sharise eyed the narrow opening, skeptical. “Anything’s better than out here.”
Imani was sure the Beast was watching them. Standing in the open made her skin itch. “Then go,” she said.
“You first,” Sharise said. “I’ll stand watch.”
“That won’t help.” Having a lookout was no protection against this fast-moving Beast, but Imani hadn’t meant to speak her miserable thought aloud.
Sharise picked up her snowboard like a bat, ready to swing it. “Just hurry.”
Imani took off her backpack and squeezed it into the gap first. So tight!
If a backpack could barely slide in, how would they fit?
For the first time, she was glad to be slightly small for her age, people forever guessing she was only eleven or twelve.
She stuck her foot in first, popping dry twigs beneath her boot, and angled her body sideways through the oddly shaped gap.
Bark brushed across her jacket in a rough, tightening embrace.
She was worried that she was ripping the fabric, but finally pulled through and crouched in the darkness.
The shelter was real! And there was plenty of room for Sharise and their snowboards. But could Sharise really get in? She had inherited more of Mom’s dancer’s body, tall and mostly thin, but her hips and butt were grown-woman wide.
“Take your jacket off,” Imani said. “Or you’ll never fit.”
Quickly, Sharise unzipped her jacket and thrust it inside for Imani to take and crumple behind her.
Underneath, Sharise was wearing the powder-blue Spelman College sweatshirt she’d slept in, her armpits ringed with dark sweat.
She rushed to angle herself inside. Her thicker leg was a tight squeeze into the gap, but her hips stuck tight. “I can’t!” she said.
“Yes, you can!” Imani said. “Shift down. It’s wider in the middle. You’re too high.”
Slithering raced through the snow behind them. They might have mistaken the sound for a cloud of dead leaves skating across the snow, but they knew the sound of the Beast. Maybe it had followed them this whole time.
Sharise pulled herself out of the gap with a shrill gasp.
“What are you doing—” Imani began, but Sharise contorted her body to try to crawl into the gap with her hands first, shifting sideways like a breakdancer. She squirmed and writhed, but her lower half was stuck again.
Imani grabbed Sharise’s biceps and pulled her, bracing with her feet. “Come on!”
With their combined strength, Sharise fell into the nook.
Snow sprayed inside with Sharise as the Beast thunked hard against the trunk behind her, moving with that remarkable speed.
They both screamed, clinging to each other hard enough to crack joints.
Imani wanted to wrap her arms around her knees and rock in place the way she used to when she was younger, but she fought the fog of panic by clinging to facts: The Beast’s snout and mouth could fit inside even if the rest of its bulk was too big.
“The boards!” Imani shouted. She fought past Sharise’s bulk in the tight space to lay her snowboard horizontally across the gap, the binding facing her.
Sharise’s breathing was small, strange yelps, as if she might faint, but she hurried to pin her board above Imani’s, sealing the gap except at the borders.
More snow flew into the slats with the Beast’s second powerful thunk against the trunk, as if it hoped to knock the tree over.
And couldn’t it? Neither of them wanted to put their hands or faces near the opening, but they lay side by side with their boots propped against the snowboards to hold them in place, with Sharise’s longer legs above Imani’s to secure the board across the wider opening, her anchor.