by Dean Koontz
He unzipped one of the pockets in his insulated jacket. It was filled with loose cartridges. When he exhausted the rounds already in the rifle, he would be able to reload quickly.
She hesitated, afraid to leave him.
“Go!” he said. “Hurry! We haven’t much time.”
Heart racing, she nodded, turned, and made her way through the trees, heading upslope, shuffling as fast as the snowshoes would allow, which wasn’t nearly fast enough, repeatedly raising her arms to push branches out of her way. She was thankful that the huge trees blocked the sun and prevented much undergrowth because it would have tangled in the snowshoes and snagged her ski suit and held her back.
Successful rifle shooting requires two things: the steadiest possible position for the gunman, and the letting-off of the trigger at exactly the right time and with the easiest possible pull. Very few riflemen—hunters, military men, whatever— are any good at all. Too many of them try to shoot off-hand when a better position is available, or they exert all the pull on the trigger in one swift movement that throws their aim entirely off.
A rifleman shoots best from a prone position, especially when he is aiming down a slope or into a basin. After taking off his snowshoes, Charlie moved to the perimeter of the forest, to the very edge of the meadow, and dropped to the ground. The snow was only about two inches deep here, for the wind came across the meadow from the west and scoured the land, pushing most of the snow eastward, packing it in drifts along that flank of the woods. The slope was steep at this point, and he was looking down at the people below, where they were still milling around the Jeep station wagon. He raised the rifle, resting it on the heel of the palm of his left hand; his left arm was bent, and the left elbow was directly under the rifle. In this position the rifle wouldn’t wobble, for it was well supported by the bones of the forearm, which served as a pillar between the ground and the weapon.
He aimed at the dark figure in the lead snowmobile, though there were better targets, for he was almost certain it was Grace Spivey. Her head was above the vehicle’s windscreen, which was one less thing to worry about: no chance of the shot being deflected by the Plexiglas. If he could take her out, the others might lose their sense of commitment and come apart psychologically. It ought to be devastating for a fanatic to see his little tin God die right in front of his eyes.
His gloved finger was curled around the trigger, but he didn’t like the feel, couldn’t get the right sense of it, so he stripped the glove off with his teeth, put his bare finger on the trigger, and that was a great deal better. He had the crosshairs lined up on the center of Grace Spivey’s forehead because, at this distance, the bullet would fall past the sight line by the time it hit its target and would come in about an inch lower. With luck—right between her eyes. Without luck but with skill, it would still take her in the face or throat.
In spite of the sub-zero air, he was perspiring. Inside his ski suit, sweat trickled down from his armpits.
Could you call this self-defense? None of them had a gun on him at the moment. He wasn’t in imminent danger of his life. Of course, if he didn’t eliminate a few of them before they got closer, they would overwhelm him. Yet he hesitated. He had never before done anything this . . . cold blooded. A small inner voice told him that, if he resorted to an ambush of this sort, he would be no better than the monsters against which he found himself pitted. But if he didn’t resort to it, he would eventually die—as would Christine and Joey.
The crosshairs were on Spivey’s forehead.
Charlie squeezed the trigger but didn’t take up all the pull in one tug because the initial pressure would throw the rifle off target just a little, so he kept the trigger mostly depressed, on the wire-edge of firing, until he brought the crosshairs back onto target, and then, almost as an afterthought but with a clean quick squeeze, he took up the last few ounces of pull. The rifle fired, and he flinched but not in anticipation of the blast, only in delayed reaction to it, by which time it was too late for the bullet to be deflected, for it was already out of the barrel. An anticipatory flinch was what you had to avoid, and the two-stage pull always fooled the subconscious a little, just enough that the muzzle blast was a slight surprise.
There was another surprise, a bad one, when he thought he saw Spivey lean forward in the snowmobile, reaching for something, lowering her profile, just as he let off the shot. Now, lining up the scope again, he couldn’t see her, which meant either that he had hit her and that she had collapsed below the windscreen of the snowmobile—or that she had, indeed, bent down at the penultimate moment, saved by fate, and was now crouching out of the line of fire.
He immediately brought the rifle around on one of the others.
A man standing by the Jeep. Just turning this way in reaction to the shot. Not gifted with split-second reactions, confused, not fully aware of the danger.
Charlie fired. This time he was rewarded by the sight of his target pitching back, sprawling in the snow, dead or mortally wounded.
Moving at the edge of the woods, Christine had reached the bend in the open land and, out of sight of those below, had moved out onto the easier ground, when she heard a shot and then, a second or two later, another. She wanted to go back to Charlie, wanted to be there helping him, knew she couldn’t do a damn thing for him. She didn’t even have time to look back. Instead she doubled her efforts, huffing out a fog of breath, trying to walk lightly on the snow, breaking through the crust because of her haste, searching frantically for wind-scoured stretches of ground where she could make better time.
But what if something happened to Charlie? What if he was never able to rejoin her and Joey?
She wasn’t an outdoors type. She wouldn’t know how to survive in these wintry wastes. If they had to leave the cabin without Charlie, they’d get lost in the wilderness, either starve or freeze to death.
Then, as if nature was intent on honing Christine’s fear to a razor’s edge, as if in mocking glee, snow flurries began to fall again.
When the first man was hit and went down, most of the others dived for cover alongside the Jeep wagon, but two men started toward the snowmobiles, making perfect targets of themselves, and Charlie lined up on one of them. This shot, too, was well placed, taking the man high in the chest, pitching him completely over one of the snowmobiles, and when he went down in a drift he stayed there, unmoving.
The other man dropped, making a hard target of himself. Charlie fired anyway. He couldn’t tell if he had scored this time because his prey was now hidden by a mound of snow.
He reloaded.
He wondered if any of them were hunters or ex-military men with enough savvy to have pinpointed his position. He considered moving along the tree line, finding another good vantage point, and he knew the shadows under the trees would probably cover his movement. But he had a hunch that most of them were not experienced in this sort of thing, were not cut out for guerrilla warfare, so he stayed where he was, waiting for one of them to make a mistake.
He didn’t have to wait long. One of those who had taken shelter by the Jeep proved too curious for his own good. When half a minute had passed with no gunfire, the Twilighter rose slightly to look around, still in a half-crouch, ready to drop, probably figuring that a half-crouch made him an impossible target when, in fact, he was giving Charlie plenty at which to aim. Most likely, he also figured he could fall flat and hug the ground again at the slightest sound, but he was hit and dead before the sound of the shot could have reached him.
Three down. Seven left. Six—if he had also killed Spivey.
For the first time in his life, Charlie Harrison was glad that he had served in Vietnam. Fifteen years had passed, but battlefield cunning had not entirely deserted him. He felt the heart-twisting terror of both the hunter and the hunted, the battle stress that was like no other kind of stress, but he still knew how to use that tension, how to take advantage of that stress to keep himself alert and sharp.
The others remained very still, burrowi
ng into the snow, hugging the Jeep and the snowmobiles. Charlie could hear them shouting to one another, but none of them dared move again.
He knew they would remain pinned down for five or ten minutes, and maybe he should get up now, head back to the cabin, use that lead time. But there was a chance that if he outwaited them he would get another clear shot the next time they regained a little confidence. For the moment, anyway, there was no danger of losing any advantage by staying put, so he remained at the perimeter of the woods. He reloaded again. He stared down at them, exhilarated by his marksmanship but wishing he wasn’t so proud of it, savagely delighted that he had brought down three of them but also ashamed of that delight.
The sky looked hard, metallic. Light snow flurries were falling.
No wind yet. Good. Wind would interfere with his shooting.
Below, Spivey’s people had stopped talking. Preternatural silence returned to the mountain.
Time ticked by.
They were scared of him down there.
He dared to hope.
56
At the cabin, Christine found Joey standing in the living room. His face was ashen. He had heard the shooting. He knew. “It’s her.”
“Honey, get your ski suit on, your boots. We’re going out soon.”
“Isn’t it?” he said softly.
“We’ve got to be ready to leave as soon as Charlie comes.”
“Isn’t it her?”
“Yes,” Christine said. Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes, and she held him. “It’ll be okay. Charlie will take care of us.”
She was looking into his eyes, but he was not looking into hers. He was looking through her, into a world other than this one, a place of his own, and the emptiness in his eyes sent a chill up her spine.
She had hoped that he could dress himself while she stuffed things into her backpack, but he was on the verge of catatonia, just standing there, face slack, arms slack. She grabbed his ski suit and dressed him, pulling it on over the sweater and jeans he already wore. She pulled two pair of thick socks onto his small feet, put his boots on for him, laced them up. She put his gloves and ski mask on the floor by the door, so she wouldn’t forget them when it was time to leave.
As she went into the kitchen and began choosing food and other items for the backpack, Joey came with her, stood beside her. Abruptly he shook off his trance, and his face contorted with fear, and he said, “Brandy? Where’s Brandy?”
“You mean Chewbacca, honey.”
“Brandy. I mean Brandy!”
Shocked, Christine stopped packing, stooped beside him, put a hand to his face. “Honey . . . don’t do this . . . don’t worry your mommy like this. You remember. I know you do. You remember . . . Brandy’s dead.”
“No.”
“The witch—”
“No!”
“—killed him.”
He shook his head violently. “No. No! Brandy!” He called desperately for his dead dog. “Brandy! Braaannndeeeee!”
She held him. He struggled. “Honey, please, please . . .”
At that moment Chewbacca padded into the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about, and the boy wrenched free of Christine, seized the dog joyfully, hugged the furry head. “Brandy! See? It’s Brandy. He’s still here. You lied. Brandy’s not hurt. Brandy’s okay. Nothin’ wrong with good old Brandy.”
For a moment Christine couldn’t breathe or move because pain immobilized her, not physical pain but emotional pain, deep and bitter. Joey was slipping away. She thought he had accepted Brandy’s death, that all of this had been settled when she’d forced him to name the dog Chewbacca instead of Brandy Two. But now . . . When she spoke his name, he didn’t respond or look at her, just murmured and cooed to the dog, stroked it, hugged it. She shouted his name; still he didn’t respond.
She should never have let him keep this look-alike. She should have made him take it back to the pound, should have made him choose another mutt, anything but a golden retriever.
Or maybe not. Maybe there was nothing she could have done to save his sanity. No six-year-old could be expected to hold himself together when his whole world was crumbling around him. Many adults would have cracked sooner. Although she had tried to pretend otherwise, the boy’s emotional and mental problems had been inevitable.
A good psychiatrist would be able to help him. That’s what she told herself. His retreat from reality wasn’t permanent. She had to believe that was true. She had to believe. Or there was no point in going on from here.
She lived for Joey. He was her world, her meaning. Without him . . .
The worst thing was that she didn’t have time to hold and cuddle and talk to him now, which was something he desperately needed and something she needed, as well. But Spivey was coming, and time was running out, so she had to ignore Joey, turn away from him when he needed her most, get control of herself, and ram things into the backpack. Her hands shook, and tears streamed down her face. She had never felt worse. Now, even if Charlie saved Joey’s life, she might still lose her boy and be left with only the living but empty shell of him. But she kept on working, yanking open cupboard doors, looking for things they would need when they went into the woods.
She was filled with the blackest hatred for Spivey and the Church of the Twilight. She didn’t just want to kill them. She wanted to torture them first. She wanted to make the old bitch scream and beg for mercy; the disgusting, filthy, rotten, crazy old bitch!
Softly, cooingly, Joey said, “Brandy . . . Brandy . . . Brandy,” and stroked Chewbacca.
57
Seven minutes passed before any of Spivey’s people dared rise up to test whether Charlie was still sighting down on them.
He was, and he opened fire. But though this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, he was sloppy, too tense and too eager. He jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it, threw the sights off target, and missed.
Instantly, there was return fire. He had figured they were armed, but he hadn’t been absolutely sure until now. Two rifles opened up, and the fire was directed toward the upper end of the meadow. But the first rounds entered the woods fifty yards to the left of him; he heard them cracking through the trees. The next shots hit closer, maybe thirty-five yards away, still to his left, but the gunmen kept shooting, and the shots grew closer. They knew in general—though not precisely—where he was, and they were trying to elicit a reaction that would pinpoint his location.
As the shots came closer, he put his head down, pressed into the thinning shadows at the edge of the forest. He heard bullets slamming through the branches directly overhead. Scraps of bark, a spray of needles, and a couple pinecones rained down around him, and a few bits and pieces even fell on his back, but if the riflemen below were also hoping for a lucky hit, they would be disappointed. The fire slowly moved off to his right, which indicated they knew only that the shots had come from above and did not know for sure which corner of the meadow harbored their assailant.
Charlie raised his head, lifted the rifle again, brought his eye to the scope—and discovered, with a start, that their shooting had another purpose, too. It was meant to cover two Twilighters who were running pell-mell for the forest at the east end of the meadow.
“Shit!” he said, quickly trying to line up a shot on one of the two. But they were moving fast, in spite of the drifting snow, kicking up clouds of crystalline flakes. Just as he got the crosshairs on one of them, both men plunged into the darkness between the trees and were gone.
The Twilighters down by the Jeep stopped firing.
Charlie wondered how long it would take the two in the woods to work their way up through the trees and come in behind him. Not long. There wasn’t a lot of underbrush in these forests. Five minutes. Less.
He could still do some damage, even if those remaining in the meadow did not show themselves. He brought one of the snowmobiles into the bull’s-eye in his scope and pumped two rounds through the front of it, hoping to smash something vital. If
he could put them on foot, he would slow them down, make the chase more fair. He targeted another snowmobile, pumped two slugs into the engine. The third machine was half hidden by the other two, offering less of a target, and he fired five times at that one, reloading the rifle as needed, and all his shooting finally made it possible for them to pinpoint him. They began blasting from below, but this time all the shots were coming within a few yards of him.
The fourth snowmobile was behind the Jeep, out of reach, so there was nothing more he could do. He put on the glove he had stripped off a few minutes ago, then slithered on his belly, deeper into the woods, until he found a big hemlock trunk to put between himself and the incoming bullets. He had taken off his snowshoes earlier, when he had needed to be in a prone position to get the most from his rifle. Now he put them on again, working as rapidly as possible, trying to make as little noise as he could, listening intently for any sounds made by the two men coming up through the eastern arm of the forest.
He had expected to hear or see them by this time, but now he realized they would be extremely cautious. They would figure he had seen them making a break for the trees, and they would be sure he was lying in wait for them. And they knew he enjoyed the advantage of familiarity with the terrain. They would move slowly, from one bit of cover to the next, thoroughly studying every tree and rock formation and hollow that lay ahead of them, afraid of an ambush. They might not be here for another five or even ten minutes, and once they got here they’d waste another ten minutes, at least, searching the area until they were sure he had pulled back. That gave him, Christine, and Joey maybe a twenty- or twenty-five-minute lead.
As fast as he could, he moved through the woods, heading toward the upper meadow and the cabin.
Snow flurries were still falling.
A wind had risen.
The sky had darkened and lowered. It was still morning, but it felt like late afternoon. Hell, it felt later than that, much later; it felt like the end of time.