FIRST EDITION
Snowblind © 2012 by Michael McBride
Cover Artwork © 2012 by Daniele Serra
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DELIRIUM BOOKS
An imprint of DarkFuse
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
www.darkfuse.com
Special thanks to Shane Staley, Greg F. Gifune, Brian Keene, Gene O’Neill, Jeff Strand, my amazing family, and all of my readers…without whom, this book would not exist.
November 21st: Pine Springs, Colorado
Today
The man staggers through knee-deep snow, buffeted by the furious wind and a battery of ceaseless snowflakes. He can no longer feel his feet, which snag on buried vegetation and slip on hidden rocks. He falls, but manages to push himself upright with the knowledge that the next time he falls might be the last. His hands ache from the bitter cold and frostbite has already begun to erode the flesh on his nose and cheeks. The blood from his chapped lips has frozen to his teeth, and despite the snow that blows into his open mouth, his throat is bone-dry. His beard is white with ice and so many crystals have crusted in his eyelashes that he can no longer force them closed. His vision is burned red, save for the myriad white shapes that race past him, making the ground seem to tilt and the buried pine trees lean.
He repeats three words over and over in his mind.
Forward.
Down.
Help.
They are the only conscious thoughts he’s capable of forming, the residue of the plan he formed when he set out. He had known at the time that it really wasn’t much of a plan, but its simplicity was what had allowed him to survive beyond the point when his faculties abandoned him. As long as he continued to move forward and follow the mountainous topography ever downward, he would eventually find a cabin or a town or someplace where he would be able to find help. And they would definitely help him…especially when he showed them what he had tucked under his jacket, against his chest.
They would have to believe him then.
He is on his face in the snow before he realizes he’s going to fall. He coughs out a mouthful of snow and pushes himself up to all fours—
—only to find the world black again. He can’t breathe. He panics and pushes himself up again on trembling arms. It takes all of his strength to rise to his knees so that he can claw the snow out of his eyes and mouth.
A light.
A distant golden aura through the shifting branches and blowing flakes.
He bellows in triumph. It is an animal sound that summons a warm trickle of blood from his trachea.
He manages to create momentum and wills his legs to carry him onward.
Forward.
Down.
Help.
The light grows brighter and brighter until he bursts from the thicket and stumbles into the tire ruts on an icy road. There are silhouettes in the light, vague outlines that he recognizes only as help.
He doesn’t recognize the words painted on the plate glass window or the tables at which he and his friends had dined only five days prior, in a purple vinyl booth beneath mounted jackalope heads and framed yellow newspaper clippings featuring colorful local stories about notorious cannibals like Alferd Packer and George Donner and various Bigfoot hoaxes. He doesn’t comprehend the startled expressions on the faces of the patrons who witness his approach. He is focused solely on the door and somehow making his useless hand open it.
The warmth assaults him. The intensity of the light blinds him.
Shadows race toward him. He hears the clatter of plates and the thunder of footsteps on his way down. Voices everywhere—loud, penetrating—but he doesn’t understand the words.
Forward has served him well and fades from the repetition.
Down vanishes when he hits the tiled floor.
He is left with help and he knows how to receive it.
He opens his jacket and his proof falls to the floor with a thud.
There is a long moment of silence.
And then the screaming begins.
November 18th: Mt. Isolation
Three Days Ago
“Help me get him in here!” Will Coburn shouted to be heard over the shrieking wind. “Hang on. Let me brace the door.”
Joel Vigil groaned in agony.
“Would you just hold still?” Blaine Shore said. He was struggling to maintain his grasp on Vigil’s legs. “You’re just going to make it worse.”
“Cut him some slack,” Todd Baumann said. “It’s not his fault.”
The blizzard had descended from out of nowhere. One minute they were skulking through the forest under a cold gray sky, following elk sign that couldn’t have been more than a few hours old, and the next they were struggling to shield their eyes from snowflakes the size of moths hurled into their faces by thirty-mile-an-hour gusts. The forecast had called for scattered flurries in the high country all weekend, but the meteorologists had been wrong. As usual. Granted, the weather in the Colorado Rockies was the definition of unpredictability, but how any of these jokers kept their jobs was beyond him. Coburn only wished he had a job like that. As an orthopedic surgeon, if he guessed wrong, he got sued. And often even when he didn’t.
“Lower him down right here,” Coburn said. “Gently. Gently. Try to keep that leg as straight as possible.”
He lowered Vigil’s torso to the snow-dusted dirt floor in a gap between broken gray boards that had been planed before his grandparents were born.
“You should be the one holding his leg,” Shore said. “I can feel the bones shifting around under there—”
Vigil moaned.
“You have the light end,” Baumann said. “I’ve got all the weight balanced under his…there.”
They slid their arms out from beneath Vigil, who bared his teeth and clenched his eyes against the pain. He must have slipped on a rock on the steep escarpment. He had been right behind them on the path one second and crashing through the scrub down the hillside the next. They had followed his cries through the blizzard until they found him at the bottom of the ravine, his right leg crumpled beneath him, his left shoulder balanced on a chunk of ice on the frozen creek, while the water spilled out underneath his head. It was below freezing and he was wet, but the more immediate concern was that the sharp edges of the broken bones could slice his femoral or tibial arteries and flood his leg with blood. They’d been lucky to stumble upon this old homestead beneath the storm.
Coburn pulled his Model 700 CDL DM bolt-action Remington rifle over his head and tossed it to the ground.
“Shore…hand me your knife.”
Coburn crawled toward Vigil’s legs. The right boot was pointing awkwardly to the side.
“My knife? Why do you have to use my…? You aren’t going to attempt to perform surgery on him out here—”
“Just give me your damn knife!”
Coburn slipped off his gloves and held out his right hand. Shore slid the hunting knife from its scabbard and slapped the hilt into Coburn’s palm.
“Thank you,” Coburn said, and proceeded to cut Vigil’s jeans from the top of his boots to his groin. He did the same thing to the thermal underwear beneath, then carefully removed the boot and finished the job on the clothing.
“Jesus,” Baumann whispered.
Vigil’s leg was a reddish-purple and black mess of bruises, but there was no indication of pooling blood, or hypostasis. Coburn checked the strength of the pulse in Vigil’s foot and breathed an audible sigh of relief. They hadn’t clipped an arte
ry. There was visible deformity, both superior and inferior to the knee joint itself, suggesting fractures to the distal femur and both the proximal tibia and fibula. He was going to have to reduce the breaks and run the risk of a whole list of potential complications as long as his arm, but doing so would only buy them so much time.
They needed to get Vigil off of this mountain, and they needed to do so right now.
“I know we’ve been doing this since we were undergrads,” Shore said, “but I think this is going to be my last year. The wife’s gone vegan and started pressing me about having a kid. And if I play my cards right, I just might make partner—”
“Why don’t you see if you can start a fire?” Coburn interrupted. “We need to get Vigil warmed up in a hurry.”
“How come I have to be the one to start a fire? I—” Vigil cried out when Coburn cautiously applied traction and inverted his foot. “I’ll round up some wood.”
Shore shed his .300 Win Mag and scampered over a snow-covered pile of wood that had once been part of the roof before the branches of the pines grew through.
“Kind of makes our ‘no cell phones’ rule seem kind of stupid now, doesn’t it?” Baumann said. He had paled considerably and couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of the lump where Vigil’s patella now sat, nowhere near where it should have been.
“We’d never get a signal up here anyway, especially with this storm. Besides, we can use the radio back at the camp.”
“If we can still find the camp…”
Coburn had no response.
Vigil’s teeth started to chatter. He mumbled something unintelligible. The skin on his face had taken on a waxy cast and beads of sweat were blossoming from his forehead.
“I need you to get some things for me,” Coburn said. “I need two lengths of wood, roughly thirty inches long and four inches wide. Are you with me, Todd?” He waited for Baumann to raise his eyes from Vigil’s leg. “I need one of the elk drag harnesses. And give me your flask.”
Baumann pulled the silver flask of whiskey from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to Coburn, then began rummaging through the heaps of rotting wood.
Coburn spun off the cap and tipped the flask to Vigil’s lips.
“Drink this, Joel.” Vigil sputtered and coughed, but managed to swallow most of it. “You’re going to be all right.”
“What…?” Vigil gasped. “What are you…?”
“Shh. Shh.” Coburn scanned the ground around him until he found a stick about the width of this thumb. “Just try to relax. This is what I do for a living.”
“Hang on—”
“Bite down on this,” Coburn said, and pressed the stick sideways into Vigil’s mouth, between his teeth.
He gripped Vigil’s leg beneath the fracture line, then pulled down and twisted at the same time.
Vigil’s cry echoed in the confines and shivered snow loose from the gaps in the roof.
* * *
Vigil had mercifully passed out while Coburn applied the makeshift splint, which was a stop-gap measure at best. They needed to get Vigil to a hospital sooner than later, the storm be damned. One of them was going to have to brave the blizzard and hike back to the camp to call for help…and hope that an emergency vehicle would be able to reach them in time. If they had to wait out the storm in order to get a chopper up there…
At least Shore had managed to get a decent fire going. If nothing else, Vigil seemed to be resting comfortably, and Coburn was grateful for the heat. He hadn’t realized just how damp his clothing had become or how cold he was beneath it. The light was a blessing, too. The ramshackle homestead was larger, although much the worse for wear, than he had initially thought. The great room where they had entered was by far the largest, but in the worst condition. More of the roof lay in heaps of rubble around their feet than above their heads. Fortunately, the broad ponderosa pine branches spared them from the brunt of the storm, although the heat was now melting the snow from the needles in a steady downpour and granting access to the rising wind, which made the bare plank walls shiver with each gust. It appeared as though someone had made a halfhearted attempt to reinforce the outer walls with stacked stones, debris, and shingles and planks with bent, rusted nails protruding from them. There was a section of the dirt floor where it almost looked like some animal had tried to dig a tunnel straight down into the hard earth. Old furniture had been broken beyond recognition, save for the tarnished brass knobs and handles partially buried in the dirt.
The other rooms were in marginally better condition. A small chamber with a rust-ravaged tin roof must have served as dry storage. Moldering leaves and dead aspen saplings dominated the frosted floor amid a scattering of opaque broken glass. There were still mason jars and cans of food rusting in the back corner beside a small square entryway that led into a stone-lined cellar excavated into the hillside. It looked more like a tomb than cold storage, and barely had enough room to contain all of the spider webs and insect carcasses. There were rusted brass bullet casings from the days before mass commercial loading on the stone floor, along with clumps of desiccated fur that suggested some animal or other had made its den in there. It smelled faintly of decomposition and feces, as though something had crawled in there to die and rotted to dissolution.
The final room, a bedroom to the right of the main room, showed signs of somewhat recent habitation. Sections of the fallen roof had been propped up with sturdy branches and there was a carbon-scored fire ring near a window that had been boarded over long ago. Shore had scrounged enough kindling to reignite the charred remains of what must have once been a four-poster bed. Vigil was resting reasonably comfortably in the opposite corner from the fire, away from the swirling smoke, which funneled up through the small holes and cracks in the blackened ceiling. Coburn watched Vigil’s chest rise and fall rhythmically beneath a silver tarp that reflected the orange and gold of the crackling flames.
It was reassuring to know that they weren’t the first to have been forced to hunker down in here to ride out a storm, although that didn’t change the fact that one of them was going to have to strike out in search of the camp and the temperatures were already plummeting as the sun began to set behind the peaks to the west. Not that the darkness caused more than a subtle diminishment of visibility through the blizzard.
Coburn checked the pulse in Vigil’s dorsalis pedis artery one last time, then set off in search of the others. He found Shore and Baumann standing outside in the snow, hunched against the wind, mere shadows in the waning light. Both gestured wildly in opposite directions as they argued at the tops of their lungs to be heard over the screaming gusts tearing through the valley. Beyond them, a shifting wall of white and gray masked the forest and the sharp descent into another invisible valley.
This was their fourteenth annual elk hunt. What at first had been a grand adventure into the wilderness had become more of an escape than anything else. The ties that bound them to their everyday lives had grown so strong that there wasn’t a man among them who couldn’t feel their pull even during this one week a year. As eighteen-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them, this had been a magical excursion into the unknown. Who was he kidding? It had been an excuse to blow off a little steam and drink a lot of beer. They’d stumbled upon a bull by accident on their final day and had been lucky to hit it once between them. It was hard to believe that those four kids had ever existed. This trip was now more about trying to find those distant shades of themselves than bringing down any mythical twelve-point behemoth.
Coburn couldn’t even envision the younger versions of Baumann and Shore as he approached. Blaine Shore had been a tall skinny kid then, and had grown into a tall skinny man, but all that remained of the long, stringy hair was a horseshoe around the sides and back. He was now the kind of guy who looked out of place without a tie and managed money market accounts or securities or some kind of funds, which essentially boiled down to investing other people’s money and taking a percentage off the top when he
so much as thought about making a trade.
Baumann was, and always had been, the diametric opposite of Shore. How they had ever gotten along would forever remain a mystery. If ever a man had lived a charmed life, it was Todd Baumann. The good-looking kid had grown into a good-looking adult. He never exercised, but looked like he lived in a gym. He was the kind of guy who could get lucky just taking his trash to the curb. The teenager who had aced his classes without ever going and spent days on end playing computer games had written a program as a twenty-two-year-old grad student that had revolutionized some sub-platform of an existing matrix of…Coburn didn’t really understand what it was, but it had made Baumann the kind of rich that boggled the mind and allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.
Vigil had always been the most grounded of them. He had grown from a stocky kid into a portly man, but he wore his weight well, like he had always been meant to wear it and was just fulfilling his biological destiny. He lived a normal life with a normal wife and two stocky little boys who would undoubtedly grow up to do the same. He was a genuine kind of guy who said what he meant and did what he said and could always be counted on to lend a hand when a hand needed to be lent. He was the regional director of a national network of pharmaceutical suppliers, sat on just about every charitable board, and coached baseball in the summer and soccer in the fall.
Coburn had been the driven one. He had wanted to be a doctor, so he had busted his hump to make it happen. He had studied while the rest of his buddies were sleeping or out on dates or at the bars. Since things had never come particularly easy to him and he had never been especially intuitive, he had been forced to accede to the notion that he was just going to have to outhustle and outwork everyone else around him, which he had done through college, medical school, and his residency. And now that he was on-staff at the largest and busiest trauma center in the entire Rocky Mountain Region, he carried that same attitude into his daily work. He often wondered how the others had seen him back then, wondered if he’d ever really been a kid at all. He found it next to impossible to give up the responsibility and the dedication and the motivation, even for a single annual hunt with his old buddies. Pathetic as it was to admit, the “No Pagers and No Cell Phones Rule” had been his. Not because he didn’t want the outside world to be able to find him, but rather because the better part of him did.
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