Chapter 36
A gust of wind swept over Zach’s face. Was that what had woken him? Had the cabin’s door blown open? The fire had nearly gone out. Zach was about to draw out his hand to grope for the headlamp when a low, creaking sound stilled him.
There was something in the room with him.
His hands clutched around Mr. Fantastic as he strained to listen, to convince himself that he’d only heard the wind, the creak of the cabin straining against the weather.
But the even, sandy hiss of it was unmistakably the in and out of breathing lungs.
Zach couldn’t move, even as his mind screamed that if cornered, to survive a predator you were supposed to make yourself look big, and just as his mother had done with the bear on the trail, talk loud and low to let the beast know you were human; that you weren’t its normal prey.
Zach repressed a shudder. Did those rules even apply for whatever thing had killed and stripped the elk?
Gnawed Ginny to bone? Left those humanlike handprints behind in the snow?
Maybe a predator like that, something that materialized out of dark skies, silent black airships, maybe a beast like that could see in the dark.
Was right now extending a long, thin claw.
Or maybe it was his father, ready to wipe him from the world in exchange for riches and the admiration that would come with them. Maybe it was Pike, not dead at all, preparing to take vengeance on the boy who had discovered his evil.
Body still as a rabbit, Zach’s eyes sought a route for flight.
And as he stared, as the blotches of firelight faded from his pupils, he saw that the door was open, a wedge of dark blue against the cabin’s black, and that this small bit of moonlight was broken by the inky shape of an amorphous silhouette moving slightly side to side, unsteady on its feet.
Zach pressed a hand over his lips to stifle any sound. Seen from his spot on the floor, the thing’s height appeared unnatural, its head skimming the roof. It undulated in the cold, a darkness on a darkness.
Immediately Zach thought of the shape-shifting creature he’d seen climbing Mount Mariah. The formless, changeable monster he’d spotted twice now in the woods.
A light swishing noise as Zach unconsciously shrugged himself deeper into his sleeping bag. The thing went still at the sound, then lurched, its approach exploding Zach’s heart into panic.
A wordless yelp tore from him, and then to his surprise, his own voice, high and clear, sounded through the room. “My—my name is Zach. I am human. I am a person. I am not prey. My name is Zach.”
The thing paused.
Hope inflated in him at the way the creature had halted, at the way his mother’s instructions were working. Louder and lower now he said, “My name is Zach Fisher. I am a person.”
A guttural roar ripped through the cabin, tilting Zach’s world into the unknowable.
The thing leapt and Zach folded around the sudden pain of violent contact with his middle—a hoof, a cloven foot, a densely furred hand crusted with dried blood—something had hit him in the stomach, taken the air from him, had crushed a rib, or stabbed him or—
Then the thing went low, was all around him, the darkness of it obliterating everything else as Zach writhed, tried to breathe around the pain, a stuck worm.
The violence was so unprecedented, the intensity of the hurt so sudden and new, that his mind couldn’t accept it, even as his body absorbed it.
Zach inhaled the sweet, sweaty reek of the monster as it lifted the head of the sleeping bag into the air.
Separate from himself now, he felt his body rolling, tumbling into the tight, narrow bottom of the sarcophagus-shaped bag.
The nylon, the soft fill of it, pressed against Zach’s mouth so tight that he was suffocating, suffocating in complete darkness before the thing released the bag, released him to slam to the floor, his nose hitting the floorboards through the fabric and synthetic fill with an awful crick sound that was somehow both sharp and muted, the blood stopping up his nostrils, the pain punctuating his vision with white splotches.
Zach turned his head and gasped, open-mouthed, only able to get the smallest sip of air because the press of the fabric, the hurt of his middle, the blood flowing from his nose blocked everything but asphyxiation.
He groped at his face and the blood wet his fingers.
He pushed those fingertips against the nylon to gain a wisp of distance between mouth and fabric, pressed a palm to the bag’s inside trying to find where he could stick his head out, breathe cool air again, unrestricted, every movement pulling deep at the new, stabbing pains in his side, his nose.
He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even moan.
And yet his mind rebelled against the idea of his own impotence, his own vulnerability, hands still making space to breathe and searching, scratching, for the bag’s opening.
In every direction there was only slick fabric, the newly bloodied fur of Mr. Fantastic, the helplessness of his own small body.
There was so little air.
Above his head a tight gathering of fabric. The opening? He pushed against it, against the nylon around him, frantically, wildly, crazed by the need to breathe.
And then he understood. He was trapped. The monster, Pike, his father, had somehow cinched the top of the sleeping bag closed, sealing him in like trash in a tied plastic bag.
An enormous, venomous spider had wound him in sticky silk so tight he could barely breathe.
It would puncture him with its fangs. Suck him dry as its needled legs forced him still and utterly helpless in this awful, suffocating trap where his breath condensed the fabric to wetness, where his blood washed things slippery, where—
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
He cupped his hands in front of his face to create an air pocket, as if those hands could generate oxygen between mouth, nose, and the sticky sleeping bag.
A dragging noise, right by his head. Something big but an oddly soft sound.
A tail tracing along the ground? A clicking.
Steps? Two or four legs? It was impossible to tell, everything muffled.
Zach strained to listen, his skin, pained breath, his tender hurt places, all torturous reminders of how trapped he was, how exposed, that hurt could come at any moment, anywhere, from any direction.
A metallic creak. The stove door? The thing cracking its knuckles? Taking out a weapon?
A grunt, deep and rough. Another sound like a voice, but also not, came through unintelligible, stifled by the stagnant cocoon of the sleeping bag.
Utter blackness surrounded him. Zach tentatively rubbed his nose, hoping to clear it so he might breathe a little easier, then recoiled from the bitter pain of his own touch.
A rotting, sulfurous smoke scent forced what little air there was to noxiousness.
Zach tucked his face into his underarm, but even through his damaged nose the smell crawled over him, inescapable, choking.
A screech from what had to be his attacker, whatever language it might be using, whatever animal instinct it exhaled, transformed by the layers of the sleeping bag into a sound of primal anger.
At once Zach was weightless. The shock of being swept into the air again emptied his lungs, stole away all thought, the vicious damage to his ribs the only pinpoint of reality in the whole world.
The thing shook the bag, as if checking for signs of life, then dropped him. This time Zach landed on his back and felt strangely grateful to the creature for not slamming his nose again, not further damaging him in this second plunge to earth.
It would be hard for Bonnie, him dying. He felt sure, there in the suffocating darkness, in the hot misery of the bloodied bag, that it would be more difficult for Bonnie if she lost him than it would be for Zach himself if he died, because dying couldn’t be much different from what he felt now.
Buried, sightless, twisted, desperate for breath.
The rest had to be more of the same, and then the bliss of no more pain.
And it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t so terrible, for him, because it was inconceivable this suffering could continue much longer.
But for Bonnie? Bonnie without Zach there as Bram’s scapegoat.
Bonnie, whose longing for their mother had made her go sunken around the eyes.
Bonnie, who had so much trouble sleeping she had to snuggle next to him to find any kind of peace.
Bonnie, Bram stalking around her, picking away at her, waiting for his opportunity to wash her from existence.
Zach couldn’t make himself move or utter a sound, could only listen for how things would end. How relief might come. He was sorry only for his sister, and the ways he’d failed her. Surely the bag would open before things finished, and at least then he’d get a last breath of pure, cold air.
Silence. Stillness.
He wiggled. Pushed against the confines of the bag. Listened.
No response. No sound.
Had the creature left him? His father would never leave a task undone this way. It had to be Pike, the monster, who had attacked. Was it stalking outside now, looking for—what? A place to lay him out on the snow like the elk, like Ginny?
He could still only manage tiny breaths of the fetid air, nose and mouth filled with blood, sweat, the decayed smoke scent. It was too hot, the bag too filled with his own exhalations.
Zach saw Shane, broken, pale, hands gripped over his mouth, and this vision of asphyxiation came on so viscerally he went wild, thrashing uselessly, mind screaming, hopeless sobs cut short only because the deep sucking motion of crying pulled the nylon tight as a plastic bag around his mouth.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
It wasn’t like being trapped under ice and snow. Some air had to get through the fabric, the zipper. Maybe he could undo whatever the thing had done to trap him?
Hampered by his hurt ribs, Zach groped above and around his head. Again he found where the fabric gathered into a cinched knot above the crown of his skull. It was tight. He couldn’t even wedge a pinkie finger through. How was that possible?
He felt for the zipper, found the interlocked line of its teeth and followed it with a fingertip, hoping to hit the zipper back so that he could try to force it down; unzip the bag from the inside.
The hard plastic line vanished into where the bag was secured at the top.
Zach whimpered. The zipper’s pull had to be trapped outside where the bag had been sealed—useless.
Unlike his mother’s sleeping bag, which also had a zipper pull at the bottom so that it was easier to control temperature, to stick out a foot or leg if you were overwarm, his child’s sleeping bag only zipped from the top down.
But this wasn’t his bag. It was Steve’s.
Zach’s fingers traced the zipper down to his hip and could reach no farther. He squeezed his eyes tight against the pain as he shuffled his body down farther into the bag. The zipper still continued past his reach. He winced. He was going to have to bend to reach farther down.
The possibility that his search would result in all hope of freedom being lost made him retch in fear, the hot claustrophobia so complete that again he kicked out, only stopping because of the pain.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
He shifted bit by agonizing bit, ribs a torture, nose a throb. It was only possible to bend into the narrowest section at all because the sleeping bag was made for an adult. He paused frequently to push the fabric from his face, to try to breathe through the panic as the air grew ever tighter.
Zach’s thumb and forefinger gripped the zipper’s tab for several seconds before he fully absorbed what he’d found, and then he cried out in relief, body shuddering with gratefulness that this was real, that it was in his hand, that he might, just might, escape.
There was no pull on the inside of the bag, forcing Zach to use his fingernails to drag the small, flat piece of plastic along the zipper.
As difficult as that was he still pulled too quickly, snagging nylon in the mechanism an inch down, immobilizing it, forcing him to carefully, so carefully, undo his progress and zip the bag back up, the pressure on his fingernail as he worked to free it of the nylon pure frustration.
Once he managed to undo the catch of fabric, he unzipped tooth by tooth, an agonizing slowness.
At five inches, he felt frozen air flood in. Salvation. Zach wrestled a hand out and pulled the zipper from the outside, awkward but infinitely easier, until he rolled out of the sleeping bag onto the dusty floor.
Sweat plastered his hair to his skull; his long underwear clung wet to his body. Blood spilled over his mouth and chin. He gulped in deep breaths. Blinked out at the room as if seeing the world for the first time.
He made out his headlamp close by on the floor, so fastened it to his head and switched it on.
Immediately he saw and snatched up his water bottle.
Drained it. Set it beside him. He wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand, avoiding touching his nose.
Already feeling the way the air crept icy at his skin, Zach cocooned the unzipped sleeping bag around him as he took in the room.
Mayhem surrounded him. The thing had emptied his backpack, flinging his belongings in every direction. The tattered, rodent-gnawed miner’s blanket lay partly on the floor, but a section of it had landed in the potbelly stove, tendrils of smoke rising.
That explained the toxic smell. The old wool, saturated with mouse-leavings, had smothered whatever fire had remained.
Light fell on the end of the sleeping bag blanketed over him. The sight of how he’d been trapped redoubled his trembling, a deep nausea rolling from his belly and the room’s disarray instantly taking on a human menace.
Someone had tied the sleeping bag closed with a silicone ski strap.