by Alma Katsu
How that feeling had never fully left him since.
A shiver ran down his spine.
All Lewis wanted was to get away from Uncle Reiner, from the eyes like fire and the carrion stink of him. “I’ll be fine, Uncle. My father taught me enough. I can get by.” He could hold it down—the lust, the thirst, the hunger.
Reiner rolled on his side to face the fire. “You think you know what’s in store for you but you don’t. Go on to bed, boy. One day, you’ll see.”
No, Lewis Keseberg decided as he climbed the ladder to his sleeping loft, putting distance between him and that frightening old man. It was good, in a way, Reiner showing up like he had. There were times Lewis could feel his honorable intentions slipping away from him. There were times, nights especially, when it was hard to resist the hunger that burned in his veins, when he gripped the corners of his bed and bit his knuckles and held in a rage that wanted to devour him, or wanted him to devour the world—he wasn’t sure which. Sometimes he wanted to give up, give in to the curse. Keseberg men, we were made like this; it’s in our nature, it’s in our blood. But seeing Reiner was as good as getting hit by a bolt of lightning. Lewis didn’t want to end up like that, always on the run, untethered, alone.
Though as he lay in the dark, imagining grabbing his uncle’s neck between his hands and squeezing so hard the skin turned purple and blood dripped from his lips, Lewis knew the odds were stacked against him. That Reiner was probably right—it was only a matter of time.
DECEMBER 1846
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Mary named the snowshoe party Forlorn Hope because that was what they were: the wagon party’s last hope. In the end, only eight of them set out: Mary and Stanton; her sister Sarah and her husband, Jay; Franklin Graves, though he seemed too sickly and had lost half his weight; Salvador and Luis, the two Miwoks who had accompanied Stanton from Johnson’s Ranch; and William Eddy.
The Murphys and the Breens refused to participate, which Mary found a relief. They ridiculed the idea and predicted the group would be back in a day—if they didn’t freeze to death. It was unclear if Salvador and Luis really wanted to go, their loyalty to Stanton at its limit, but they didn’t seem to want to stay behind with the men who had just killed the Paiute boy.
The ones leaving were reluctant to take much; there were so many remaining who needed to be fed. Patrick Breen and Dolan said that they should leave with nothing. They were going to die anyway, and whatever they took would go to waste.
They chose their provisions carefully. They were weak, and every ounce would matter if they needed to run. They packed an ax, some rope (tied around Eddy’s waist like a belt), and a blanket each, worn over the shoulders like a cape. Stanton and Eddy each took their rifles. Margaret Reed and Elizabeth Graves snuck them a few days’ worth of dried beef. At the last minute, Mary saw Stanton slip some extra items in his coat pockets, though she didn’t know what they were.
It wasn’t snowing the morning they left, a good sign. Elizabeth gave Mary’s father a brief kiss, the first sign of intimacy between them that Mary had seen in a long while. The loss of both William and Eleanor had been almost too much for her mother to bear.
Mary found it was harder to say good-bye to her remaining siblings. This was the first time in their entire lives they would be separated. The three younger Graves sisters and two boys hugged Mary and Sarah tightly. “Don’t cry. We’ll send help and then we’ll all be together again,” Mary said, hugging them in return. She wasn’t sure if she really believed what she was saying.
As the dawn broke over the horizon, bright pink with a fine edge of blue, they started toward the mountains.
CHAPTER FORTY
Stanton had grown old in a week. He was dazzled by snow, sunblind and sore—a vast, unending series of heights and valleys, all of it made identical beneath a blanket of white. They walked ten hours a day, by his estimate, but only seemed to make a few miles. They would need over a month to reach help.
They had rations for five days, and so had begun eating only at night.
Mary kept track of the days by knotting a length of string, a long brown thread pulled from the hem of her skirt, and each knot seemed to tie down something fluttering inside Stanton’s chest—some tiny part of him that still awoke to the idea of love. He was amazed she could make the knots at all, that her fingers could still bend when his, brittle, blackened by frostbite, were often useless even after he’d warmed them by the fire.
Evenings he gathered wood, compelled through his exhaustion by a stubborn animal force that wanted him to live. They slept sitting up, hunched by an open fire, when they could sleep at all. Charles, Eddy, Franklin Graves, and Jay Fosdick took turns standing watch at night, though Graves was failing quickly and sometimes could hardly be roused in the morning.
Usually, the fire melted out a hole beneath itself. By morning, the snowshoe party would lie encased at the bottom of a pit six or more feet deep, and the climb to the surface of steep white walls used energy they could little afford to waste. Stanton feared the day when one of them would be too weak to make the climb.
For days they had had no sign of the wolves—or beasts of any kind.
But as they began to weaken, Stanton sensed a change. He began to hear noises in the woods—whispers, the hiss of quick-footed movement through dead trees. He knew how predators tailed injured animals, dying animals, and waited for them to falter. The snowshoe party was dying, slowly but surely, and the diseased wolves had picked up the scent.
Another day of darkness transmuted into a landscape of dazzling white: Stanton welcomed the night, if only because he could rest his eyes. Often he felt as if they were bleeding, or as if someone were tickling them with a knife; when Eddy had lost his vision altogether temporarily, he had had to walk with one hand on Stanton’s belt.
Mary collapsed next to him. They huddled together under the same filthy blanket, though it did little good. It seemed he was always wet, always cold, always hungry.
Her face was sunburnt, her nose raw and peeling. She reached into her pocket and brought out a strip of dried beef. “Your dinner.” She always said that, dinner, though it was his only meal of the day. “Eat slowly.”
“How much is left?” It hurt to eat. His stomach recoiled and grasped all at once. His teeth sang with the cold, and the slow decay of too long with too little. “Enough for how many days?”
She shook her head. “Don’t think about it, not now. We’ll find something.”
The sky was darkening fast, but the fire wouldn’t catch; the wood was wet. Eddy took his turn with the flint, then Stanton, and then Jay. Stanton stood back and saw the sun pooling behind the mountains, saw daylight pouring, melting away, and his exhaustion turned to a primal kind of fear.
“Take the ax,” he told Jay. “Get a tree down. Get branches down, get something down.” He went toward the woods at nearly a sprint, despite the clutching pressure of the snow. He had thought an hour ago he could not walk another step, but now he was electric with fear; without fire, they had no chance. They’d freeze in their sleep. And fire seemed to keep the wolves, or whatever was following them, at bay.
The thwack of the ax head rang through the hollow. Slow, though—too slow. Even if Jay could fell a tree they would never split the wood in time. Stanton plunged into the deep shadows of a stand of solemn, stooped evergreens. He ducked beneath the branches to feel for wood dry enough to burn; he found twigs, kindling, nothing they could use for any length of time. He kept going, losing sight of the camp, desperate, half mad—from the snow, the endless climb, the hunger, the pointlessness of a fight they kept fighting.
Beneath a massive pine he found some wood largely protected from the weather by the funnel of branches above them. He collected as much as he could; it would last them an hour, maybe more, long enough for Jay to split some wood from a tree.
He had turned back to camp when, from the corne
r of his eye, he saw movement. Fast, like a wolf running between the trees.
But they were not wolves.
Another shadow, another dark thing moved fast between the trees.
He dropped the wood in the snow, keeping hold only of a stub of pine. He struck his flint against it. Catch, damn you. Sparks flew harmlessly into the snow. His fingers were clumsy, frozen stiff. He almost dropped the flint but managed to grab it at the last second.
He heard the thing behind him only seconds before it would have jawed his neck.
He turned blindly, swinging the branch like a club. Heard it connect, saw the dark and twisted thing, half man and half beast, fall back between the trees.
A kind of demon. A monster.
There was no other word for it.
Stanton ran—or as close to it as he could in the knee-high snow. Sweat poured down his face, instantly freezing in place, pulling at his cheeks, forcing his mouth into a grimace.
Panic surged through him, mingling with disbelief.
Tamsen had been right.
The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.
Now, his mind raced, his blood flowed too fast in his veins. He strove for breath as he fumbled for his rifle on his back. Where was his rifle?
It had never been a pack of diseased wolves preying on them, attacking the cattle, looming in the tree line. Had it?
It had always been . . . these things.
No. No. He was coming unhinged. He slowed and looked back at the trees, squinted.
The shadows darted and lunged, morphed into the snowy night.
Where was his rifle?
Then he remembered he had propped it against the trunk of a tree at the edge of the woods. He would have to sprint to reach it. The snow here was over his knees now; the darkness had come.
He threw his weight into each step. Don’t look back, just go. His blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it: a wet kind of panting, a ragged excitement, as if whatever was pursuing him had to breathe through thick, damp rot.
Closer. Closing in on him.
Whatever had attacked him, whatever he’d seen, it was real. They were real.
I’m sorry. He didn’t know what for—for not believing the tales Tamsen had spread through the party? For not protecting them?
For a life wasted not in sin, not really, but in the strangling belief of sin?
He could see the rifle now, and beyond it a thin trail of smoke, the beginnings of a campfire. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him.
He was only feet from the rifle when the thing sprang. He felt the swipe of something sharp and painful on his calf; it felt as if someone had pressed a red-hot brand to his flesh. Then burning pain in his right calf, too, and he was wallowing in the snow like a baby. He tried to crawl forward on his hands and knees, but something had his legs and was dragging him backward. Another slash to the back of his head, the pain so intense he saw white flashes.
He could not die this way.
Not now.
Not yet.
His fingers grazed the very end of the rifle stock. Slipped. But the thing had him now, had a mouth around his ankle—Stanton gasped in terror as he saw human eyes, a human nose . . .
Whatever it was, it had been a human once.
And yet it was not human now, this creature. Its teeth weren’t human; Stanton felt them hook deep beneath his skin, down into the muscle, and something wet and terrible probing between them that he knew must be a tongue.
He kicked the thing once, hard, in the face. It didn’t let go, but for a moment he had a little more room and, twisting, he got a hand around the gun.
He rolled again onto his back and brought the rifle to his chest, firing directly at the eyes.
The monster released him. Stanton didn’t wait to see if it was dead. He struggled to his feet, and the pain when he put weight on his right leg blacked his vision. There were more of them, massing in the trees. He fired again, blindly, not sure whether he was aiming at the shadows. He stood there shaking and bleeding into the snow, and saw them regrouping, flowing into a dark fluid mass. He lifted his rifle again when a sudden movement made him turn: One of them had sprung at him from the left, had ambushed him, and before he could aim it was on top of him, driving him backward into the snow and knocking the rifle from his hands.
It smelled like a corpse left too long in the heat. But its fingers were cold, and slimy, and wet—rotten. He choked on the smell. He tried to throw it off but he was pinned and too weak to fight. Its mouth seemed to double, its jaw unhinging like that of a snake. He saw teeth sharpened like iron nails, and too many of them, far too many—a long slick of throat, like a dark tunnel, and that horrible tongue slapping like a blind animal feeling for its prey.
Then an explosion split his forehead in two. The thing recoiled—Stanton tasted vomit—it scuttled backward, half its face hanging like a broken shutter. It moved. It was alive.
There was shouting. Mary was at his side, knees down in the snow, tugging him. Crying and screaming. “Why did you leave us? You know it’s not safe. What were you thinking? Why did you leave?”
William Eddy was right behind him, holding a smoking rifle. But his eyes were fixed on Stanton’s leg, and his expression didn’t lie.
“Pretty bad, huh?” Stanton asked. “The monsters got me.” It sprang from his mouth before he realized how crazy it sounded.
Was it crazy?
Maybe that was the curse of these mountains—they turned you mad, then reflected your own madness back at you, incarnate.
Like some sort of biblical punishment.
Mary kept hold of his arm, as though he might get up, climb to his feet, and walk away.
Stanton could feel the disease as it entered him, the shiver of something dark and slick and alien in his veins, so cold that it burned. How long would it take, he wondered, for him to turn? Several days? A week? He would be dead by then, at least, frozen to death or consumed by the monsters when they returned.
And even if it hadn’t been the disease—it didn’t matter now. As injured as he was, they’d never get him back to camp, or close enough to the ranch to get help.
“Go,” he said to Mary. “Run. There are more. They’ll be here any minute.”
“I can’t leave you,” she said.
Did she believe him? Could she possibly understand? It was too cold to cry, but even in the dim light from the distant fire—they had gotten it burning, after all—her pain was visible. There was no part of her face it didn’t touch.
“You have to.” He looked to Eddy. The urgency and horror still swam inside him, making him dizzy, sick. He had to rest his head . . . “Go. Get as far from here as you can.”
Eddy picked up Stanton’s rifle. “You want me to reload it?”
“No, take it with you. You’ll need it. I’ll be fine.” To Mary: “Go now. I want you to live, Mary. Without that, there’s no point. No point at all.”
Still, she wouldn’t move from his side. “I won’t leave you. I won’t.” Her voice was like the crack of ice; she was breaking. They were all breaking.
His mouth began to sting and water. His vision began to glaze and sparkle. Mary’s pale face loomed so close. He wanted so badly to kiss her.
But he didn’t trust himself. Who knew what the taste of her lips might do to him?
Who knew what the sudden hunger singing in his veins might do to her?
“Go,” he said, one last time, a final surge of certainty moving through him, taking the rest of his strength with it. He was glad that Eddy hooked her under the arms and hauled her to her feet. He wouldn’t have had the will to ask her again. He mi
ght have pleaded with her to stay with him. He might have begged her to lie down in the snow, her arms wrapped around his chest, until the beasts came to devour them.
He might have kissed her until he’d devoured her himself. He curled his fingers into the snow, trying to cool the rising heat in his veins, making him burn.
For a long time he could still hear her shouting, screaming his name, calling for Eddy to release her. Finally it became as distant as the whistle of wind through the peaks.
He waited until he could not tell the difference before reaching into his pocket. He’d brought two items with him, sentimental indulgences. One was his tobacco pouch; it held his last twist of Virginia gold. He had to blow hard on his hands to put any motion in the joints; then, he carefully took a sliver of paper and placed the last shreds of tobacco in it. Licked the end of the paper and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. Somehow got the flint to strike, caught a lucky spark. Babied the tiny spark into a flame. Took a deep breath and carried the spicy, warm smoke down into his lungs. Good. A last good thing.
The heat inside him was all-consuming now, but he tried to still his mind. Memories passed through him like shadows over water: His grandfather, usually so stern and unforgiving, counseling a parishioner for grief over the death of his wife. The rain running hard on the roof in the attic of Lydia’s house, how she pressed against him, her hair tickling his face when she leaned down to kiss him. His life could’ve stopped at that moment and he’d have been fine with it. He had failed her, and had struggled to make it right ever since; maybe, after all, this was his penance. The mills of God grind slowly, yet grind exceedingly fine. He wondered where Edwin Bryant was, and hoped he was alive.
He forced himself not to think about Mary—not yet.
Finally he had smoked the cigarette down to his nail beds and released it to the snow. From his other pocket, he took out a small pistol. Mother-of-pearl inlay, pretty as a piece of jewelry. He’d held on to it, thinking it the perfect reminder of Tamsen Donner. Beautiful but deadly. He checked the chamber for a bullet.