Chapter 34
Father and son were still, each seer and seen. Zach stared at Bram’s raised hand. A hand that had done irrevocable things. A hand that had ripped a line between a before and an after.
Despite knowing that Bram hadn’t been first to strike, the idea of being near his father, being anywhere in reach of that raised hand, caused a cold, rough tongue of fear to drag across Zach’s insides.
He turned his back on Bram and fled uphill.
His father yelled something, words drowned by the remove, by the blood thundering through Zach’s ears. A turn in the path and Bram’s voice faded. Another and it was gone altogether.
Zach’s breathing was ragged, uneven, and he realized he was crying. But he pressed upward, his muscles, his gut, his heart raging with the physical need to go to ground.
With no sense whatsoever of how far he’d traveled or for how long, he spotted the tree he’d eaten under. It grew straight and even from the slope of the path’s uphill side. Its downhill limbs extended partially over the trail. The tracks that passed it swung slightly wide to avoid these branches.
As Zach approached, he couldn’t see signs he’d previously taken refuge there. Any earlier markings made when he’d ducked under the tree had been disguised by the messy arcs the lowest limbs traced along the powder as they blew in the wind.
He popped out of his skis. Without them distributing his weight, his boots sank into the snow. If his father looked closely he’d see these footprints, these deep holes in the ski tracks and get suspicious, wouldn’t he?
But there was nothing Zach could do about that.
Zach shoved one ski, then the other, then his poles through the boughs to land on the protected ground below the tree. They were satisfyingly difficult to see draped in the shadows.
He left his backpack on, took down his hood, clipped on his helmet, and put on his goggles to protect his eyes from the scrape of pine boughs.
Then he parted the branches and took an enormous step over the tree-scratched powder and through the limbs.
Unsteadied by the shift in weight and the resistance of the branches, he nearly fell, but managed to seize a limb tight and lever himself forward until he crashed through.
He lay on the ground under the skirts of the tree, resting a beat as the dry pine smell surrounded him.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
He sat up. A hot line of pain let him know he’d scraped his cheek. He touched it lightly as he peered through the branches toward the trail. His back foot must have dragged along the powder, leaving a shallow line in the snow from the ski tracks to where he now hid.
Zach took hold of a branch and moved it experimentally back and forth. As it swept through the snow, its markings obscured part of the line.
More confident now, he did the same with another branch, then another after that. Snow fell from the tree to pockmark the powder, and the branches’ tips roughed the signs he’d left behind.
He paused. If someone was paying enough attention, they might find the number of half circles traced by the branches odd. But if his father was rushing? It looked okay. Okay enough he probably shouldn’t do any more.
Zach dragged his things to the opposite side of the tree’s shelter to avoid their colors catching his father’s eye. He wedged his backpack against the tree trunk as a kind of pillow and rested against it.
No longer in motion, Zach’s shivering intensified. The snow that had worked its way into his collar and cuffs as he hid in the powder had left both pain and numbness behind. And his mind clamored, now that he was still, with the unendurable reality he’d deferred fully facing.
His father was planning to kill him.
The tears sprang up again, the vicious answer to the unanswerable “why” of it throbbing painfully through his mind.
Why? Because Zach had never been and could never be good enough.
He’d failed to earn his father’s love. Failed to prove a worth greater than whatever Bram could trade him for.
Which meant Bram would toss Zach’s body like an offering into the fathomless maw of his greed.
His chest strained with the immensity of his shortcomings, with fear for his sister if he wasn’t there to take the brunt of Bram’s disappointment.
If Zach had only done things right, better, gotten a little closer to perfect?
I don’t think you ever did. Love us. I don’t think you can.
His heart stuttered at the thought of his mother. Was something broken in Bram? And if so, did that mean there was nothing broken in Zach?
Maybe it was as simple as Russ had said. Bram was selfish. So selfish he’d do anything to get exactly what he wanted.
Zach wrapped his arms tight around his knees and closed his eyes.
In his head the hut filled with the chattering mothers, the chaos of children.
He groaned aloud at the longing that rolled through him.
For fire, warmth, affection. To be by Russ in the hut.
To be near his mother. He’d never had to worry about earning her love, yet she hadn’t loved him enough to stay.
She’d trained them to survive but had chosen to die.
Or else she hadn’t cared enough to fight her addiction, allowing herself to go unconscious, slip under, and leave them behind.
Adults burned the world down, threw their children into that fire, and as they warmed themselves they told each other it couldn’t be helped, it wasn’t their fault, it had all been necessary, that there had never been any other way.
Zach’s balled fists wiped away his tears. He wouldn’t obediently allow himself to be used for ends and sacrificed to things he couldn’t see, couldn’t name, didn’t understand. He’d done that his whole life, but never again. Not when his sister was at stake.
He would do as his mother said but not as she did.
He’d survive, he’d never willingly leave Bonnie behind.
Never leave Bonnie to remember him the way he had to remember their mother, tousling his hair at the hut, Good morning, Zakky, because she knew he got embarrassed if she hugged him in front of other kids.
Why had he ever been embarrassed? His mother’s grin, her cheering as he finished a race.
Her expression of wonder as they’d found the miner’s cabin.
Zach straightened, eyes snapping open. The cabin.
It instantly became the den that would protect him from all things.
He’d been stupid to think he could get back to the hut and hide without his father catching up to him, finding him, spotting his tracks.
And after what Zach had just witnessed he saw a new unpredictability, new stakes.
Even if he played Dave the recording, even if Dave believed him, there might be violence.
But in the cabin? No one could reach him in that fairy-tale, unfindable place.
Almost no one had ever found it, hidden among overhanging trees, buttressed by the steep cliff that ran behind it, wrapped in mysterious spells and magic.
Zach had the inexplicable certainty that even the miner’s ghost would watch over him, happy to be needed after more than a hundred years.
It was far away. It would be cold. But it had solid walls and a potbelly woodstove his mom had thought looked functional.
If he could light a fire there, he could survive.
He wouldn’t put himself, Dave, and Russ in any danger.
He could avoid his father altogether and simply wait out the time until rescue.
From the cabin he’d be able to hear any helicopter, any snowmobile coming to find them; he’d be close enough to quickly head downhill toward the hut.
He could even watch the hut, hidden along the tree line near the cabin.
And help would come. It would come because Steve hadn’t checked in with his team.
Because Shane and Jon wouldn’t arrive home.
Because Dave and Russ wouldn’t return to Russ’s new stepmother.
When help came he’d be safe, a wall of strangers between him and his father, the phone pressed into the hands of someone in charge.
Now he understood why in scary movies people always did such stupid things. It was impossible to focus when you were listening for the huff of a scenting beast; for the exhale of a man so much stronger than you. The cabin was the obvious choice, and he should’ve settled on it earlier.
A cold blade of wind shrieked through the forest, yet another reminder of all the things that wanted to lay claim to his body.
And through it, a crunching sound.
Zach forced himself still. He’d seen a snowshoe hare from a ski lift once, only spotting it because the animal had suddenly bounded across the open snow. In motion, it became a rabbit. When motionless, it transformed into a single black eye.
And here he was, a skittish rabbit, dressed in black, hiding in shadows from a predator. Zach squeezed his eyes shut.
The sound drew closer, pulling deep at the place behind Zach’s temple the same way the noise of a rusty hinge did.
Behind his eyelids a monster’s talons ripped flesh and brought it to a lipless mouth; a dull rock began to glisten with blood as it rose and fell.
A wheezing, a creaking. It had to be his father, yet all Zach could imagine was a whip-tailed creature sniffing the air, searching for him. It parted the branches, razor teeth luxuriating with anticipation as they hovered, about to sink into his neck.
A pock-pock of poles or hooves puncturing the windblown crust of snow. A woosh of skis or of dank, clotted fur skimming over powder.
Zach squinted through one eye, which instinctually fixed on motion.
It was not his father.
A shadow, close to the ground, detached then fused with the gloom of the trees on the opposite side of the trail.
It floated above the snow, low and fast but still indistinct between the branches, size impossible to gauge from Zach’s vantage.
Was that a thick switch of brown fur? A flash of golden skin?
A bristled, spiny back? Zach closed his eyes against the sight of it, a whimper slipping from him, body pushed hard against the tree trunk to hide from the thing, make himself invisible.
Could it smell him, was it even now doubling back to strip his eye sockets, crush his chest?
Zach listened to the crack of trees, the strange instrumentals of the wind through the woods, until at last he forced his body to break its clenching tension. Opened an eye.
Nothing but hibernating forest. Nothing to hear but the rapid thrash of his heart.
But there, along the trail lay hollows that the thing’s feet, its hands, had left behind.
Zach didn’t dare emerge from his hiding place to check if they were the same clawed tracks he and Russ had seen in the woods.
The idea of waiting here relying on nothing but hope and a scrim of branches to protect him as his father passed by or the monster doubled back was utterly unbearable.
With a shaking hand, Zach clicked through the GPS options, and assigned an “X” to where he thought the cabin sat, just above a flat area that had to be the meadow with its mine, backed by the tight topographic lines indicating the cliff behind it. Two miles and change away.
Not as far as he’d assumed. But with the obstacles, the grade of the slope, and the way he’d have to turn the climb into easier to manage switchbacks, very far.
But he craved action and movement so desperately it was almost a compulsion.
He’d escape, hide his tracks, by crawling out from the back of the tree.
He could begin his trek uphill there. Neither Bram or the creature should be able to see his tracks that far away from the trail.
How much time did he have? Why hadn’t his father passed by yet? He had to be drawing a curtain over the horror he’d left behind. Pike stiffening, pushed downhill where the cold water of a hidden stream ran over him, his blood irrigating it red.
Zach forced himself through the branches out into the snow. In motion again, in possession of a plan, a wing of hope beat through him.