Chapter 37
Zach drew a finger along the band as if to verify its existence. Yes, it was one of the promotional straps Steve had handed out to the group that first day. It might even be the extra strap that had been in Zach’s own pack.
It had to have been Bram who attacked him, bruised his middle, broke his nose. His father who cinched him tight to smother him, suffocate him.
Yet Zach was still alive. Would his father have left him that way? Half broken yet still breathing, Zach provided no benefit to Bram whatsoever. Maybe Pike had clambered up that cliff and pursued Zach.
Maybe he simply didn’t understand the monster.
Zach thought back to his paralysis, his inability to speak, as he’d been dropped to the ground.
Maybe his father did think he was dead.
He closed his eyes, disoriented. Every beat of his heart hurt his nose. Every breath felt like a kick to his hurt side.
Bram, Pike, the monster—why had it pulled the blanket through the room and left a corner stinking and smoking in the extinguished stove?
What had it been searching for as it dumped Zach’s things on the floor?
Maybe Bram had realized the earring was gone and thought Zach had taken it.
Maybe Russ had tattled that Zach had his phone, and his father or Pike realized he might have recorded them.
His thoughts buzzed and dropped like a radio station gone out of range. Did he have a concussion? He needed to focus. Because none of the strangeness of the scattered things, the blanket in the stove, really mattered. Not when his attacker might come back, bringing more pain. Worse pain.
A hand to his middle, Zach stood and limped to the door.
He tried to shut it against the wind and the approaching dawn, but as he pushed it swept up the snow that must have tumbled inside when the thing entered, making it difficult to fully close.
Zach leaned his back on the door, let his weight fall against it, until he could fasten the simple wooden latch.
The immediate cut in the wind clawing its way through the cabin, the sense that something, at least, lay between him and the menace of whatever had only just left, allowed him to think, to assess.
His shirt was stiffening, the blood on it already beginning to freeze. His teeth clattered.
The pants he’d hung to dry had landed halfway under the bed. The shirt was still over the chair where he’d left it. He gathered them up.
How many times in the last forty-eight hours had he been forced to remove wet clothing from wet skin, put on a dry but dirty base layer? Zach sagged with exhaustion over the endless cycle of self-preservation he’d somehow fallen into, an inescapable loop.
His pants were easy to remove, turning inside out as he flopped them off his feet. The shirt was far more difficult, and Zach let himself weep with the agony of pulling the bloodied shirt over his head and putting on the dry one.
Maybe the monster had broken his rib. Cracked him. Like it had done to Ginny.
The clothes didn’t feel fully dry. Not really. But they were in far better condition than what he’d removed, and he felt warmer almost immediately.
A hard coughing seized him, slicing through his muscles, his lungs, his face. The smoke from the smoldering blanket was irritating, the stench growing denser now that the door was closed. The whole cabin creeped with the potential return of the beast, with the awful burned rot.
Where could he go? There was nowhere at all that was warm. He’d have to hide in the tree line, watch the hut, wait for rescuers to show. Try for the hideout he and Russ had dug under the tree, the only possibility for safe shelter he could think of.
Zach picked up his coat from where it lay twisted on the floor, and as he gingerly put it on his headlamp reflected off an object almost completely hidden by the wool blanket.
Russ’s phone. His attacker must not have noticed the phone falling from Zach’s coat pocket during the crazed search through the cabin, or hadn’t cared enough about the phone to take it.
The screen lit as Zach picked it up: 5:51 in the morning, 10 percent battery left.
The absence of the familiar lump in his coat alerted him that his emergency kit was gone, too.
It had been zipped in. Had his father or Pike taken it, searched it for the earring there?
An awful longing for the kit constricted his heart, because it had been a gift from his mother.
A quick swipe of his headlamp around the room, and he saw it open next to the woodstove, contents spilling out.
While shoving them back in he frowned. The camping matches were missing.
In his exhaustion had he used them the night before?
But he didn’t need them. And he was wasting time.
His shaky fingers struggled to slip the kit, the phone, into a pocket.
His whole body felt somehow distant yet its pain so very present, the cold daggering through him, every creak of wind the creature’s frozen claw down his spine.
He picked his way through the room, toeing things aside rather than bending over to sort through them to find what he needed, because any movement of his torso triggered searing bands that lapped deep and cruel around his bones.
Zach bent at his knees, keeping stiff as he could, to pick up a mitten.
His goggles. He found and gingerly pulled on socks, snow pants, his helmet.
His boots stood by the door where he’d left them.
There was his other mitten. There was no sign of the GPS.
But he didn’t need it. The cabin was so close to the hut, and the hut would be easily visible from the trees.
Zach cracked the door and peered out, queasy over heading into the nighttime wilds so unprepared. The skies had cleared. Dawn was dimly visible at the edges of the forest. Zach eyed the dark circle of trees warily. Were yellow eyes watching? Did reddened teeth wait, just there, just out of sight?
He put a hand to his damaged head as if to still the spin of his imagination. There was no monster. A monster hadn’t wrapped that ski strap around the sleeping bag. A monster hadn’t looted his bag searching for something. What he needed to fear was his father. Maybe Pike.
The fumes rising from the blanket went intensely bitter in his throat and painful to his eyes, as if to remind him of the urgency of fleeing.
He’d have to rely on the wind he heard howling outside to obscure his tracks as he headed toward the tree well shelter.
Zach scrambled out onto the snow, not powder now by the door but pressed more solid by the intruder’s slither into the cabin.
His skis and poles had been knocked over, either by the wind or the attacker.
His boots wouldn’t latch, the bindings iced over.
Zach lifted each ski, his side a livid burning, his face all a throbbing pain as he jabbed the pointed end of his pole into the locking mechanism to knock out any obstruction.
At last he was able to secure his boots to his skis.
He tried to ignore the rattle of branches in the forest around him, each sound the creature plunging through the woods to attack; the Underself weaving like a ghost through the trees.
His headlamp picked up large indentations in the snow that had to be tracks, already so windblown they were unidentifiable.
Which hopefully meant his tracks would vanish, too, even though the sky was clear and snow no longer fell.
The pain forced Zach to move slowly and to take breaths as small as he could make them.
He traveled down the gentle slope through the trees in the direction of the mine, planning to cut along the edge of the clearing for easier travel where branches wouldn’t snatch at him.
His headlamp bore a dim hole ahead. Was his light making predatory things invisible in the darkness outside its circle?
Was something, someone, even now softly, smoothly approaching as his headlamp blinded him to anything outside its reach?
He switched off his light. The seethe of wind through trees hollowed him with loneliness.
Against the immensity of the mountains, against the unforgiving chill of the air, he felt keenly his smallness, his vulnerability, how easy it would be for jaws to swallow him.
He waited to let his eyes adjust a little.
It was better, only having the coming dawn and the fading moonlight to guide him.
Branches, fallen logs, rocks, stood out black and distinct against the snow without the headlamp, making obstacles easier to avoid.
Even better, he had a wider range of vision, which lessened his sense of being followed, his fear of something slipping through the darkness unseen to finish its brutal work.
As the ground leveled and the trees opened into meadow, Zach stopped to orient himself, looking for the sign memorializing the Swede.
The wind whipped the snow into frenzied whorls in the openness of the clearing, clouds of it veiling things then snapping back to reveal what they’d hidden.
Yes, there was the big rock—so close! Only ten feet from him.
Which meant the sign was—yes, there it was against the rock face.
Sure of where he was and where he was going, he followed the line of trees ringing the clearing in the direction of Mariah Trail.
The exertion, the deep breathing required now that he was no longer headed downhill, squeezed Zach’s ribs so horribly that he paused to rest after moving only about fifty feet.
His injuries made all of it so much more difficult than he’d expected, not letting him move with enough rigor to warm himself. Maybe he should head back, at least the cabin had walls, maybe—
Zach stiffened at a noise. Tipped an ear toward whatever rippled through the air.
A flash of light caused a seizing fear, Zach’s chest going painfully tender.
The light grew, stroking tree trunks, branches, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Zach recalled Dave’s story of alien creatures descending from night skies to obliterate cattle and leave behind bloodless mystery, but he forced the idea away as childlike fantasy.
No silent black ship hung over the meadow.
Nothing but fading stars met his eyes when he looked up.
It came from almost exactly the spot he had planned to plunge into the woods to head in the direction of the trail.
Panic momentarily overcame pain and Zach dove into the trees to hide himself, a ski catching under a branch that took him a moment to free, a whip of pine across a cheek that made him gasp.
But the second the shroud of a pine’s thick branches lay between him and where the light was growing he squatted low, willing himself to disappear, to be absorbed.
Maybe his black coat, pants, the way he was balled tight and near to the ground might keep him out of the thing’s sight, indistinguishable from a rock or log poking through the powder.
He tucked his head between his knees, forcing himself not to look, to stare straight down into the snow, to avoid triggering the sixth sense of whatever approached that it was being watched; that its prey was eyeing it from the woods.
The light washed over him. There was silence. And then a voice.
“Come on out.”
Zach didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
“I can see you. I can see your tracks. Come out.”
Zach obeyed his father.