by Dean Koontz
Charlie slung the rifle over his shoulder again, and they started climbing once more.
Above the setback, on the last slope before the ridgeline, the trees thinned out, and there was more snow on the ground, although not enough to require snowshoes. Charlie found a deer path, which followed the route of least resistance toward the flat top of the ridge. Where the track passed unavoidably through deep snow that might have given Joey trouble, the deer had cleared the way—there must have been dozens of them through here since the last big storm, tamping the snow with their hooves—and the boy was able to proceed with only a little slipping and sliding.
Chewbacca became excited by the scent of the deer that had come this way before them, whimpered and growled in the back of his throat, but didn’t bark. She realized he hadn’t once barked since leaving the cabin. Even when startled by the fox, he had made only a small sound that couldn’t have carried far, as if he sensed that a bark would have been a beacon for the witch. Or maybe he just didn’t have enough energy to climb and bark at the same time.
Each upward step not only put ground between them and their pursuers but seemed to take them into worse weather. It was as if winter were a geographic reality rather than an atmospheric condition, a real place rather than a season, and they were walking deeper into its frigid kingdom.
The sky seemed only inches higher than the treetops. The flurries had changed to heavy snow that slanted down between the pines and firs. By the time they reached the crest of the ridge, where there were no trees at all, Christine could see that a new storm had moved in and that, judging by this early stage, it was going to be even worse than last night’s storm. The temperature was well below zero, and the wind was beginning to churn up from the valleys, driven by the rising thermals, blowing harder and gusting more fiercely even as they stood there, trying to catch their breath. Within a couple of hours, the mountain would be a white Hell. And now they were without the warm refuge of the cabin.
Charlie didn’t immediately lead them down into the next valley. He turned and, standing at the edge of the ridge, stared thoughtfully back the way they had come. Something was on his mind, a plan of some sort. Christine could tell that much, and she hoped it was a good plan. They were outnumbered and outgunned. They needed to be damned clever if they were going to win.
She stooped beside Joey. His nose was running, and the mucus had frozen to his upper lip and to one cheek. She wiped his face with her gloved hand, cleaning him as best she could, and she kissed each of his eyes, held him close, keeping his back to the wind.
He did not speak.
His eyes looked through hers, as before.
Grace Spivey, I will kill you, Christine thought, looking back the way they had come, into the woods. For what you’ve done to my little boy, I will blow your goddamned head off.
Squinting as the stinging wind blew snow into his face, Charlie surveyed the top of the ridge and decided it was just the place for an ambush. It was a long, treeless expanse, running roughly north and south, as narrow as fifteen feet in some places, as wide as thirty feet in others, mostly swept free of snow by the gales that punished its exposed contours. Rock formations, smoothed and carved by centuries of wind, thrust up all along the crest, providing a score of superb hiding places from which he could observe the ascending Twilighters.
At the moment there was no sign of Spivey’s people. Of course, he could not see particularly far down into the shadowed woods. Although the trees were not as densely grown on the slope immediately under him as they were on the lower hills, nevertheless they appeared to close up into a wall no more than a hundred or a hundred and twenty yards below. Beyond that point, an army could have been approaching, and he would have been unable to see it. And the wind, whistling and moaning across the top of the ridge, evoked a noisy hissing and rustling from the branches of the enormous trees, masking any sounds that pursuers might have made.
Instinctively, however, Charlie sensed that the cultists were still at least twenty minutes behind, maybe even farther back. Climbing toward the top of the ridge, slowed down by Joey, Charlie had been sure they were losing precious lead time. But now he remembered that Spivey’s gang would ascend cautiously, wary of another ambush, at least for the first quarter or half a mile, until their confidence returned. Besides, they had probably stopped to have a look in the cabin and had wasted a few minutes there. He had plenty of time to arrange a little welcoming party for them.
He went to Christine and Joey, knelt beside them.
The boy was still detached, almost catatonic, even unaware of the dog rubbing affectionately against his leg.
To Christine, Charlie said, “We’ll head down into the next valley, as far as we can go in five minutes, find a place for you to get out of the weather a little. Then I’ll come straight back here and wait for them.”
“No.”
“I should be able to pick off at least one before they dive for cover.”
“No,” Christine said, shaking her head adamantly. “If you’re going to wait here for them, we wait with you.”
“Impossible. Once I’m finished shooting, I want to be able to clear out fast, make a run for it. If you’re here with me, we’ll have to move slow. We’ll lose too much of our lead on them.”
“I don’t think we should separate.”
“It’s the only way.”
“It scares me.”
“I’ve got to keep picking them off if I can.”
She bit her lip. “It still scares me.”
“It won’t be dangerous for me.”
“Like hell it won’t.”
“No. Really. I’ll be above them when I start shooting. I’ll be well concealed. They won’t know where the fire’s coming from until it’s too late, until I’ve already pulled out. I’ll have all the advantages.”
“Maybe they won’t even follow us up here.”
“They will.”
“It’s not an easy hike.”
“We made it. They can, too.”
“But Spivey’s an old woman. She isn’t up to this sort of thing.”
“So they’ll leave her behind at the cabin with a couple of guards, and the rest of them will come after us. I have to make it hard for them, Christine. I have to kill all of them if I can. I swear to you, an ambush won’t be dangerous. I’ll shoot one or two of them and slip away before they even have a chance to spot my location and return my fire.”
She said nothing.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re wasting time.”
She hesitated, nodded, and got up. “Let’s go.”
She was one hell of a woman. He didn’t know many men who would have come this far without complaint, as she had done, and he didn’t think he knew any other woman who would consent to being left alone in the middle of this frozen forest under these circumstances, regardless of how necessary the separation might be. She had as much emotional strength and stability as she had beauty.
Not far north along the ridgeline, he found where the deer trail continued, and they followed it down into the next valley. The path made two switchback turns to avoid the steepest slopes and take full advantage of the friendliest contours of the land. Charlie hoped to lead them most of the way to the bottom before turning back to set the trap for Spivey’s people. In five minutes, however, because the deer trail added distance as well as ease to the journey downward, they had not reached the floor of the valley, were not even halfway there.
He found a place where the trail turned a corner and passed under a rocky overhang, creating a protected hollow, not a full-fledged cave but the next best thing, out of the wind and out of what little snow sifted down through the trees. At the far end of the niche, opposite the curve in the trail, the hillside bulged out, forming a wall, so that the natural shelter was enclosed on three of its four sides.
“Wait here for me,” Charlie said. “Better break off some of the dead branches toward the center of that big spruce over there, start a fire.”
; “But you’ll only be gone . . . what . . . twenty or twenty-five minutes? Doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort to build a fire just for that long.”
“We’ve been moving ever since we left the cabin,” he said. “We’ve continuously generated body heat. But sitting here, unmoving, you’ll start to notice the cold more.”
“We’re wearing insulated—”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll probably still need the fire. If you don’t, Joey will. He doesn’t have an adult’s physical resources.”
“All right. Or . . . we could keep moving, heading down along the deer trail, until you catch up with us.”
“No. It’s too easy to get lost in these woods. There might be branches in the trail. You might even pass one without seeing it, but I might see it, and then I wouldn’t know for sure which way you went.”
She nodded.
He said, “Build the fire here, on the trail, but just out beyond the overhang. That way the smoke won’t collect under here with you, but you’ll still be able to feel the heat.”
“Won’t they see the smoke?” Christine asked.
“No. They’re still beyond the ridge, with no clear view of the sky.” He quickly unstrapped the snowshoes from his backpack. “Doesn’t matter if they see it, anyway. I’ll be between you and them, and I hope to take out at least one of them, maybe two, and make them lie low for at least ten minutes. By the time they get started again, this fire’ll be out, and we’ll be on down in the valley.” He hurriedly slipped off his backpack, dropped it, kept only his rifle and pocketsful of ammunition. “Now I’ve got to get back up there.”
She kissed him.
Joey seemed unaware of his departure.
He headed back the way they had come, along the narrow deer path, not exactly running, but hurrying, because it was going to take longer to go up than it had to come down, and he didn’t have a lot of time to waste.
Leaving Christine and Joey alone in the forest was the most difficult thing he had ever done.
Joey and Chewbacca waited under the rocky overhang while Christine went into the trees to collect dead wood for a fire. Underneath the huge spreading branches that were green and healthy, close to the trunks, the evergreens provided a lot of dead branches thick with old pinecones and crisp brown needles that would make excellent tinder. These were all dry because the upper, living branches stopped the snow far above. Furthermore, the weight of those snowbent upper branches had cracked and splintered the dead wood underneath, so she found it relatively easy to wrench and break off the kindling she needed. She swiftly assembled a big pile of it.
In short order, with a squirt of lighter fluid and a single match, she had a roaring blaze in front of the cul-de-sac where she and Joey and the dog took shelter. As soon as she felt the warmth of the fire, she realized how deeply the cold had sunk into her bones in spite of all the winter clothing she wore, and she knew it would have been dangerous to wait here, unmoving, without the fire.
Joey slumped back against a wall of rock and stared at the fire with a blank expression, with eyes that looked like two flat ovals of polished glass, empty of everything except the reflection of the leaping flames.
The dog settled down and began to lick one paw, then the other. Christine wasn’t sure if its feet were just bruised or cut, but she could see that it was hurting a little, even though it didn’t whine or whimper.
Around them the stone began to absorb the heat from the bonfire, and because the wind didn’t reach into the cul-de-sac, the air was soon surprisingly warm.
Sitting next to Joey, Christine pulled off her gloves, zipped open one of the pockets in her insulated jacket, and took out a box of shotgun shells. She opened the box and put it beside the gun, which was already loaded. That was in case Charlie never came back . . . and in case someone else did.
60
By the time Charlie reached the top of the ridge, he was short of breath, and a stabbing pain thrust rhythmically through his thighs and calves. His back and shoulders and neck ached as if the heavy pack was still strapped to him, and he repeatedly had to shift the rifle from hand to hand because the muscles in both arms were weary and aching, too.
He was not out of shape; back in Orange County, when life had been normal, he had gone to the gym twice a week, and he had run five miles every other morning. If he was beginning to tire, what must Christine and Joey feel like? Even if he could kill a couple more of Spivey’s fanatics, how much longer could Christine and Joey go on?
He tried to put that question out of his mind. He didn’t want to think about it because he suspected the answer would not be encouraging.
Running in a crouch because the wind along the ridge had grown violent enough to stagger him, he crossed the narrow rocky plateau. Snow was falling so thickly now that, on the treeless summit, visibility was reduced to fifteen or twenty yards, considerably less when the wind gusted. He had never seen such snow in his life; it seemed as if it were not just coming down in flakes but in cold-welded agglomerations of flakes, in clumps and wads. If he hadn’t known exactly where he was going, he might have become disoriented, might have wasted precious time floundering back and forth on the ridge, but he moved unerringly to a jumble of weather-smoothed boulders along the crest and flopped down on his stomach at a place he had chosen earlier.
Here, he could lie at the very lip of the slope, in a gap between two lumpy outcroppings in a long series of granite formations, and look straight down a winding section of the deer trail that he and Christine and Joey had climbed and along which the Twilighters were certain to ascend. He inched forward, peered down into the trees, and was startled by movement hardly more than a hundred yards below. He quickly brought the rifle up, looked through the telescopic sight, and saw two people.
Jesus.
They were here already.
But only two? Where were the others?
He saw that this pair was moving up toward a blind spot in the trail, and he figured they must be the last in the party. The others, ahead of these two, had already gone around the bend and would soon reappear higher on the path.
Of the two who were in sight, the first was of average size, wearing dark clothing. The second was a strikingly tall man in a blue ski suit over which he was wearing a hooded brown parka, his face framed in a fringe of fur lining.
The giant in the parka must be the man Charlie had seen in Spivey’s rectory office, the monster Kyle. Charlie shuddered. Kyle gave him the creeps every bit as much as Mother Grace did.
Charlie had expected to have to wait here awhile, ten minutes or even longer, before they came into sight, but now they were almost on top of him. They must be climbing without pause, without scouting the way ahead, reckless, unafraid of an ambush. If he’d been a couple of minutes slower getting here, he would have walked right into them as they came over the crest.
The deer trail turned a corner. The two Twilighters moved out of sight behind a rock, around a stand of interlaced pines and fir.
His heart racing, he shifted his sights to the point at which the trail emerged from those trees. He saw an open stretch of about eight yards in which he would be able to draw down on his targets. The distance between him and them would be only about seventy yards, which meant each round would be approximately one and three-quarters inches high when it impacted, so he would need to aim for the lower part of the chest in order to put a slug through the heart. Depending on how close together the bastards were, as many as three of them might have moved into that clear area before the first would be drawing close to the next blind spot. But he didn’t think he would be able to pick off all three, partly because each would be in the way of the other; one target would have to fall to give him a good line on the next. They were also sure to leap for cover as the first shot slammed through the woods. He might bring down the second one during that mad rush for shelter, but the third would be hidden before he could realign his sights.
He would hope for two.
The first appeared, st
epping out of shadows into a gray fall of light that splashed down in a gap among the trees. He put the crosshairs on target, and he saw it was a woman. A rather pretty young woman. He hesitated. A second Twilighter appeared, and Charlie swung the scope on that target. Another woman, less pretty and not as young as the first.
Very clever. They were putting the females first in hope of foiling an ambush. They were counting on his having compunctions about killing women, compunctions they did not have. It was almost amusing. They were the churchfolk, and they believed they were God’s agents and that he was an infidel, yet they saw no contradiction in the fact that his moral code might be more demanding and inviolable than theirs.
Their plan might have worked, too, if he hadn’t served in Vietnam. But fifteen years ago he had lost two close friends, had almost died himself, when a village woman had come to greet them, smiling, and then had blown herself up when they stopped to talk with her. These were not the first fanatics he had ever dealt with, although the others had been motivated by politics rather than religion. No difference, really. Both politics and religion could sometimes be a poison. And he knew that the mindless hatred and the thirst for violence that infected a true believer could turn a woman into a rabid killer every bit as deadly as any man with a mission. Institutionalized madness and savagery knew no limitations as to gender.
He had Joey and Christine to consider. If he spared these women, they would kill the woman he loved and her son.
They’ll kill me, too, he thought.
He was repelled by the need to shoot her, but he brought his sights back to the first woman, put the crosshairs on her chest. Fired.
She was lifted off her feet and pitched off the deer path. Dead, she slammed into the bristling branches of a black spruce, bringing a small avalanche of snow off its boughs and onto her head.
Then a bad thing happened.