Koontz, Dean - Dark of the Woods

by Dark Of The Woods(Lit)

  For a time, it seemed as if they were the only living beings in all the world, two figures in a landscape without purpose and without meaning. All other things were inanimate: cold, snow, sky, earth, stark trees, strangely stilled wind . . .

  It was a tomb planet, a dead world, and they were rodents scurrying through its corridors and chambers in search of some exit that would lead them into life.

  The thing which made them run so fast was the knowledge that they might soon cease to be rodents and become two more corpses to inhabit the cells of the tomb.

  Then, with the swiftness of a sleepwalker stepping on a nail, the world came awake with a thundering explosion of sound. The sky was filled with the chatter of the blades of an aircraft whose flight pattern was too high for grav plates to be of any use—a staccato barrage like machine guns from some ancient period of man's history. The forest took up the sharp call and threw the clatter of the big engines back at the low clouds.

  "Hurry," Davis said as they reached the edge of the mountain flatland and began to descend another treacherous slope toward the long bowl of the valley through which they would be walking for the next four or five hours, if Leah was not confused about the way to the Tooth.

  "Let me have the suitcase," she said.

  "Never mind that."

  "You can't brace yourself with two rucksacks and the suitcase on uneven ground. You know that as well as I do. Now quit arguing and hurry it!"

  He set the case down without stopping, merely slowing his pace for a moment, heard her grapple with it, heft it and bring it after him. He worked from tree to tree down the sheet-white land beneath the bare trees, his eyes on the skies that could be seen through the Crosshatch of limbs more often than they were focused on the terrain ahead. She followed.

  When they were halfway down, the police copter rushed by overhead, oblivious of them as it sped toward the spot the Sherlock had last pinpointed them. Under its belly was the "A" of the Alliance, ringed with the circle of green worlds that was the government symbol. Then it was gone, and its hoarse voice diminished as it put distance between itself and the very fugitives it was seeking.

  "How long until they know?" she asked when they reached the floor of the valley.

  "Not long."

  "I thought so."

  "Well," he said, "we're on the level for a good while. We can make time easy enough."

  "But if they discover we've struck for the valley and decide we're still in it, it'll be no trouble for them to pen us in and use a search party to net us from all sides."

  He leaned against a jutting tower of granite which was encased in ice, took some snow in his mouth and allowed it to melt before swallowing. "That's true enough. But this is the only route, isn't it?"

  "The only one we could possibly stand up to."

  "We could give up the fortress idea."

  "And go where?"

  He shrugged.

  "You take the suitcase a while," she said. "We're on the level again, and it won't be too hard for you. My arms ache."

  He took the luggage without comment, turned back to the trail and started forward at a very brisk walk. Several hours away, at the other end of the lowland, he could see the pass through which they must go to eventually reach Tooth and the fortress—if there was a fortress. If the Alliance had been too sure of itself to send more Sherlocks along with those police, then he and Leah might make that pass and, perhaps, even Tooth Mountain. If the government was, on the other hand, hedging all corners of their bet, this was the place in which both of them would die. . . .

  He found a stream, a seven-foot-wide span of water which was mostly frozen over by a thin crust of ice. It was almost certain that the stream ran down the center of the valley, from one end to another, following a fairly straight line, and it would therefore provide the shortest route to the pass. He paralleled it religiously, walking on its banks most of the time, except for one stretch where it cut deeper into the land and formed small cliffs to either side where thick, thorny brambles grew—their bite unsoothed by the white garb of winter they wore.

  They were more than halfway across the depression, within an hour or so of the pass, when Leah grabbed his arm and yanked on it for him to stop. When he turned, she held a finger to her lips and said: "Listen."

  At first, all he could hear was the rush of air in and out of his own lungs and the roar of blood through his temples. Then the thing she wanted him to hear impressed itself above these sounds: a chattering—like copter blades. He tilted his head, searched the air for another piece of the noise, caught it again, closer this time. It was coming fast . . .

  "Quick!" he gasped, grabbing her and pulling her backwards, off the bare earth along the banks of the stream, into the trees and brush.

  "The suitcase!" she said.

  He had set it down when she stopped him and had forgotten to bring it into concealment with them. It stood on the bank, looking a dozen times larger than it really was, a monument to his stupidity.

  He looked anxiously at the gray sky, the falling snow, back the way they had come. There was no sign of the copter, though the noise of its engines and the roar of its blades grew closer and closer. He stood, took a step toward the suitcase, and caught sight of the aircraft coming across the tops of the trees five hundred yards away!

  He fell, crashing into the brush, pressing desperately down into the shadows there. He felt thorns prick through his gloves, gouge his cheeks. There was a warm flush on his face, and he knew that he was bleeding a little. That didn't bother him as it once would have. He was no longer thinking about the handsome image he must present to fans. He was thinking, instead, about winning this hard-played game to salvage his life. And hers. His survival instinct had always worked well on an intellectual level, for he had been able to save his sanity from his parents even as a child. But now, in this last day, that instinct was functioning on a physical plane as well; and he was pleased enough of that development to feel a surge of pride and delight as the Alliance copter swept overhead without slowing, without spotting the suitcase.

  "Are you all right?" Leah asked.

  He got to his knees, pulled a thorn from the edge of his lip, wiped his face, looked at his blood-smeared hand. "It looks worse than it is. I was just lucky not to collect one in the eye."

  "What are they doing?"

  He looked to the pass, saw the Alliance copter taking up position at the way between the mountains. Directly beneath the place where it hovered, the ribbon of this stream tumbled down over gray rocks.

  "They know we're in the valley," he said. "They're waiting for us to come out."

  "Then they must have police coming in at the other end."

  He looked back the way they had come, listened. He thought he detected the sound of a second copter, somewhere back along the stream. "Let's go."

  "Where?"

  "Through the pass. Maybe we can find some way to sneak past the copter."

  "They'll have men on the ground at that end, won't they?"

  "Maybe. But we can't just sit here and wait. And it's easier to go ahead than to double back and try to slip through the search line. They're bound to have hand tracking units, heat sensors. Maybe not anything nearly as sophisticated as Sherlocks, but something good enough to keep us from passing them unnoticed."

  "I'll take the suitcase a while," she said, pushing past him, through the brush, and grabbing the supplies.

  "Maybe we should leave it here."

  "And let them find it so they know we're running scared."

  "They must know that already."

  "And so they're certain we haven't left the valley yet?"

  "And they must know that too."

  "I'll carry it anyway," she said. "Break a trail."

  He moved off, staying beneath the trees now, though maintaining their proximity to the stream so that there was no danger of their getting lost. He kept them out of sight of the copter dancing on the air at the end of the valley, though they caught glimpses of it
now and then when they were forced to dash across an open stretch of land where they felt painfully unprotected in the white spotlessness of the virgin snow.

  The light was slowly beginning to leave the sky when they were near to the end of the valley. For the last half hour, the land had sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper, and their spirits had lifted with it. There had been no encounter with the searchers and, except for the area of the stream itself, the pass was thickly treed, providing heavy cover for them to slip through the net of their captors, A thousand feet from the brink of the valley and a reprieve from the from the pressure the Alliance had put on them, Davis called a halt so that they might gather energies for the last leg of the assault and so that he could reconnoiter to see if things were going to be as simple as they seemed.

  They were not.

  He had left Leah and gone only a third of the way up the slope, slipping quietly from tree to tree, when he saw the sentries stationed only a dozen feet down from the top of the ridge. They were stooped so that they could not be silhouetted against the sky, and each of them cradled a rifle across his knees. They peered intently downward, and he realized that, if the valley had not been slightly darker than the top of the ridge in these last minutes of daylight, they would be able to see him as he now saw them. They were no more than five feet apart. If that spacing had been maintained across the entire width of the pass, there must be a hundred and fifty men in the line. Which meant there had been other helicopters involved in the operation and that the men had been brought up from the other side of the pass. It seemed as if the entire mountain range had been blanketed by the Alliance. It pleased him to know that they considered the two of them important game. But he supposed any totalitarian government must go to great extremes to punish each and every violator of its dictums, lest one man who escapes their wrath becomes a symbol of rebellion for the masses.

  Carefully, so as to make not the slightest sound or present even the slightest movement to the sentries, he worked his way back through the brush and the snow to Leah. He noticed, as he moved, that the wind had picked up, even though the snow had stopped, and that the disturbances he caused in the landscape were fairly swiftly eradicated by the brisk air.

  "Well?" she said when he returned.

  "We can't get through."

  "I have bad news too," she said.

  "What?"

  "See that clearing half a mile down in the valley?"

  He nodded.

  "A moment ago, a line of searchers moved through it, each only a few feet away from the other. They must have been in the woods to either side of the clearing with the same distance between them. Every other man carried a short-range heat sensor and was fanning it in front of him."

  He looked at the now empty clearing in the fading light below. "They'll be here in half an hour."

  "Less. They were walking rather fast."

  IX

  DAVIS FINISHED digging the snug cave into the drift and said, "Hand me the blanket." When she passed the coverlet to him, he pushed it to the back of the snow-walled chamber without unfolding it, examined his handiwork once again, then turned around, smiling. "It's all done and looks like it won't cave in on us. We ought to have even a few minutes to spare to give the wind a chance to erase our tracks."

  "Proteus," she reminded him.

  He turned to the hovering protection robot, reluctant to make this final move. He had come to depend on the presence of a mechanical bodyguard, and there was something almost sacrilegious—something taboo—about shutting it down without having a temporary replacement. But when he looked down the slope and saw the lamps of the soldiers who were beating the brush for them, lamps lighted only moments earlier, not even five minutes away now, he reached out, thumbed the stud that opened Proteus's sliding access panel, and quickly cycled down the machine's systems with one toggle control until it was totally inactive except for its grav plates, which damped slowly to a complete shutoff, letting the sphere settle softly to the ground without sustaining damage. None of the sensors nodes gleamed from without or within. For the first time in nearly three years, Proteus was "asleep."

  Davis hefted the sphere, pushed it through the narrow tunnel that led into the snow cave, shoved it to the far end of the small chamber. Leah went through next, disappearing from sight, and he brought up the tail end after taking a final look at the approaching, irresistible line of lights that bisected the valley floor. Inside, he required two minutes of hasty work to block off the entrance with snow which had been piled in the entrance tunnel for that purpose. He knew the seal must be clumsily obvious from outside, a blotch on the smooth sweep of the remainder of the drift, but he could do nothing more but trust to the now rather stiff and persistent winds and the whipping clouds of fine, dry snow to conceal his labors as well as the majority of their footprints.

  Inside the igloolike dwelling, the air was relatively warm, for there was no wind at all, and what little body heat did escape them was contained in the small area that had been carved out of the white stuff. Snow proved such a good insulator, against even the slightest draft, that he wondered why he had not thought of this the first night out rather than erecting the flimsy and dangerous lean-to. He supposed it was because the survival instinct had not yet bloomed from the bud he had then possessed.

  They sat, quietly, shoulder to shoulder with Proteus at their feet, still and mute.

  They could hear a faint wind.

  As yet, nothing more.

  Davis felt as if they were mice, huddled there in the darkness, anxiously waiting for the cats to pass by and leave them so they might resume life as normal mice should live it. And, like the mouse in his wall nest, he felt as much relieved as afraid. There was at least two, and possibly three feet of snow on every side of them except one. Snow would either hold their body heat within the little room he had excavated or filter the warm air into coolness before it reached the world outside. On the one side where there was no snow, the back of the chamber, there was a rock wall, which should certainly prevent the emanations of bodily heat from reaching the delicate sensors of the thermal detectors carried by the Alliance troops. If things worked as they planned, as they thought they should, the searchers would stomp right by them and collide with the sentries at the top of the ridge. They would then conclude that their quarry had somehow gotten through the pass—either before the line of sentries had been posted or in the first moments of the watch when the soldiers' attentions were not as sharp as they should have been. Excuses would be made, heads would roll, but at least he and Leah would get by unscathed.

  He hoped.

  "Have they gone by and—" she began.

  He shushed her.

  Outside, the faint sound of footsteps, breathing, and a few muttered commands passed as if down a line in chain communication, echoed in the night and found their way through the shell of the snow cave.

  Davis sat very still, as if the slightest movement might cause the drift in which they hid to collapse and blow away on the wind, leaving them exposed and defenseless.

  The voices faded; the footsteps faded; the breathing sounds were gone . . .

  The wind replaced all of them.

  "I think it worked," she whispered.

  "Let's wait," he said.

  The time went by so slowly that he felt he was going to have to scream to get it moving again. He remembered how, when he was hollowing out the drift to make a place to hide, the minutes went by so rapidly. If time were not only so subjective, but objective as well, maybe a man would not have so much trouble in life!

  Then the sound of footsteps came again.

  They were slower, more purposeful, and accompanied by commands shouted by the officers to search into the trees as well as to all sides. Every few steps there was a commanded halt when, Davis imagined, every rock and snowflake received an intimate scrutiny. He wondered whether the wind had done its job well enough to allow the seal to their snow chamber to pass that close investigation.

&nb
sp; Then the footsteps drew even with them and another halt-and-examine period was called for.

  Leah took his hand, snuggled against him.

  Time passed.

  He wondered how quickly he could activate Proteus and get him working, then remembered that Proteus could not be used against other men, even if they did mean you harm.

  "Advance!" a voice called. Immediately, the line walked several more paces, past the entrance to their hideout before stopping for another examination of the terrain immediately before it. They were safe. The command had ordered a second search of the valley, had sent tired men back to tackle an even more tiring chore than that which they had just finished. And both times, their dugout had withstood scrutiny and had not aroused any suspicions.

  He was about to turn to Leah to ask what they could do to celebrate the occasion and still remain inside a cramped hole inside a hollow snowdrift on top of a mountain, in subzero weather—but he heard her light, fluttering snore and discovered she had fallen asleep even as the line had been passing them. He shook his head, chuckled, unable to envision the sort of steel nerves that would have allowed sleep at a moment like that, even if sleep was so terribly in need.

  Gently, he unfolded the heat radiating blanket, pulled it around them, aligned the heat makers, and settled down for a night's rest. It was very likely that the Alliance would hang around through the earliest of the daylight hours, just to check the place over one more time, in full light, before admitting the fugitives had slipped through their grasp. But if the entrance seal had been sufficiently covered now, it would even be more obscured in the morning. By tomorrow afternoon, they should be able to break out, rested and fed, and continue the journey. There was the possibility that they could find themselves coming up on the tail end of the Alliance search party, which would now be ahead of them; but as long as they stayed in territory the troops had thoroughly searched, they were safe. And then there was the chance . . .