by Dean Koontz
Christine had just put more fuel on the fire and had settled down beside Joey again, under the rock overhang, when she heard the first rifle blast echo down through the forest.
Chewbacca raised his head, his ears pricking up.
Other shots were fired a second or so after the first, but they weren’t from Charlie’s rifle. There was a steady chatter of shots, a thunderous metallic ack-ack-ack-ack which she recognized from old movies, the blood-freezing voice of an automatic weapon, maybe a machine gun. It was a cold, ugly, terrifying sound, filling the forest, and she thought that, if Death laughed, this was how he would sound.
She knew Charlie was in trouble.
Charlie didn’t even have time to line up the second shot before the machine gun chattered, scaring the hell out of him. For a moment the racket of automatic fire echoed and reechoed from a hundred points along the mountain, and it was difficult to tell where it came from. But the events of the past few days had shown that his hard-learned war skills had not been forgotten, and he quickly determined that the gunman was not on the slope below but on the ridge with him, north of his position.
They had sent a scout ahead, and the scout had laid a trap.
Pressing hard against the ground, trying to become one with the stone, Charlie wondered why the trap hadn’t been sprung earlier. Why hadn’t he been gunned down the moment he’d come onto the top of the ridge? Maybe the scout had been inattentive, looking the wrong way. Or maybe the heavy snow had closed around Charlie at just the right time, granting him a temporary cloak of invisibility. That was probably part of the explanation, anyway, because he remembered a particularly thick and whirling squall of snow just as he’d come over the crest.
The machine gun fell silent for a moment.
He heard a series of metallic clinks and a grating noise, and he figured the gunner was replacing the weapon’s empty magazine.
Before Charlie could rise up and have a look, the man began to fire again. Bullets ricocheted off the boulders among which Charlie was nestled, spraying chips of granite, and he realized that none of the other shots had been nearly this close. The gunner had been pumping rounds into the rocks north of Charlie. Now the piercing whine of the ricochets moved away, south along the ridgeline, and he knew the Twilighter was firing blind, unsure of his target’s position.
There was, after all, a chance Charlie could get off the ridge alive.
He got his feet under him, still hiding behind the boulders, keeping low. He shuffled around a bit until he was facing north.
The gunner stopped firing.
Was he just pausing to study the terrain, moving to another position? Or was he changing magazines again?
If the former were the case, then the man was still armed and dangerous; if the latter, he was temporarily defenseless.
Charlie couldn’t hear the noises he had heard when the magazine had been changed before, but he couldn’t squat here and wait forever, so he jumped up anyway, straight up, and there was his nemesis, only twenty feet away, standing in the snow. It was a man in brown insulated pants and a dark parka, not changing the machine gun’s magazine but squinting at the ridge plateau beyond Charlie—until Charlie popped up and caught his attention. He cried out and swung the muzzle of the machine gun toward Charlie.
But Charlie had the element of surprise on his side and got off a round first. It struck the Twilighter in the throat.
The man appeared to take a great jump backward, swinging his automatic weapon straight up and letting off a useless burst of fire at the snow-filled sky as he collapsed. His neck had been ripped apart, his spinal cord severed, and his head nearly taken off. Death had been instantaneous.
And in the instant Death embraced the machine gunner, as the sound of Charlie’s shot split the cold air, he saw that there was a second man on the ridge, thirty feet behind the first and over to the right, near the rocky crest. This one had a rifle, and he fired even as Charlie recognized the danger.
As if battered by a sledgehammer, Charlie was spun around and knocked down. He struck the ground hard and lay behind the boulders, out of sight of the rifleman, out of the line of fire, safe but not for long. His left arm, left shoulder, and the left side of his chest suddenly felt cold, very cold, and numb. Although there was no pain yet, he knew he had been hit. Solidly hit. It was bad.
61
The screams brought Christine out of the cul-de-sac, past the dying fire, onto the trail.
She looked up toward the ridge. She couldn’t see all the way to the top of the valley wall, of course. It was too far. The snow and the trees blocked her view.
The screaming went on and on. God, it was awful. In spite of the distance and the muffling effect of the forest, it was a horrible, bloodcurdling shriek of pain and terror. She shivered, and not because of the cold air.
It sounded like Charlie.
No. She was letting her imagination run away with her. It could have been anyone. The sound was too far away, too distorted by the trees for her to be able to say that it was Charlie.
It went on for half a minute or maybe even longer. It seemed like an hour. Whoever he was, he was screaming his guts out up there, one scream atop the other, until she wanted to scream, too. Then it subsided, faded, as if the screamer suddenly had insufficient energy to give voice to his agony.
Chewbacca came out onto the trail and looked up toward the top of the valley.
Silence settled in.
Christine waited.
Nothing.
She returned to the sheltered niche, where Joey sat in a stupor, and picked up the shotgun.
It was a shoulder wound. Serious. His entire arm was numb, and he couldn’t move his hand. Damned serious. Maybe mortal. He wouldn’t know until he could get out of his jacket and thermal underwear and have a look at it—or until he began to pass out. If he lost consciousness in this bitter cold, he would die, regardless of whether the Twilighters came along to finish him off.
As soon as he realized he was hit, Charlie screamed, not because the pain was so bad (for there was no pain yet), and not because he was scared (though he was damned scared), but because he wanted the man who had shot him to know that he was hit. He shrieked as a man might if he were watching his own entrails pour out of a grievous wound in his stomach, screamed as if he knew he were dying, and as he screamed he turned onto his back, stretched out flat in the snow, pushed the rifle aside because it was of little use to him now that he no longer had two good hands. He unzipped his jacket, pulled the revolver out of his shoulder holster. Keeping the gun in his good right hand, he tucked that arm under him, so his body concealed the weapon. His useless left arm was flung out at his side, the hand turned with the palm up, limp. He began to punctuate his screams with desperate gasping sounds; then he let the screams subside, though putting an even more horrible groan into them. Finally he went silent.
The wind died down for a moment, as if cooperating with Charlie. The mountain was tomb-quiet.
He heard movement beyond the boulders that screened him from the gunman. Boots on snow-free stone. A few quick footsteps. Then wary silence. Then a few more footsteps.
He was counting on this man being an amateur, like the guy with the machine gun. A pro would be shooting when he came around the granite formation. But an amateur would want to believe the screams, would be congratulating himself on a good kill, and would be vulnerable.
Footsteps. Closer. Very close now.
Charlie opened his eyes wide and stared straight up at the gray sky. The rock formation kept some of the falling snow out of his way, but flakes still dropped onto his face, onto his eyelashes, and he needed all of his will power to keep from blinking.
He let his mouth sag open, but he held his breath because it would spiral up in a frosty plume and thus betray him.
A second passed. Five seconds. Ten.
In another half minute or so, he would need to breathe.
His eyes were beginning to water.
Suddenly this seem
ed like a bad plan. Stupid. He was going to die here. He had to think of something better, more clever.
Then the Twilighter appeared, edging around the hump of granite.
Charlie stared fixedly at the sky, playing dead; therefore, he couldn’t see what the stranger looked like; he was aware of him only peripherally. But he felt sure that his performance as a corpse was convincing, and well it should have been, for he had provided a liberal display of his own blood as stage dressing.
The gunman stepped closer, stood directly over him, looking down, grinning.
Charlie had to strain not to focus on him, had to continue to look straight through him. It wasn’t easy. The eye was naturally drawn toward movement.
The stranger still had a rifle and was still on his feet, better armed and more agile than Charlie. If he realized Charlie was still alive, he could finish the job in a fraction of a second.
A beat.
Another.
Irrationally, Charlie thought: He’ll hear my heart!
That irrational terror gave rise to a more realistic fear—the possibility that the gunman would see Charlie’s pulse beating in his neck or temple. Charlie almost panicked at that thought, almost moved. But he realized that his coat and the attached hood concealed both his neck and his temples; he would not be betrayed by his own throbbing blood flow.
Then the Twilighter stepped past him, to the lip of the ridge, and shouted down to his fellow churchmen on the slope below. “I got him! I got the son of a bitch!”
The moment the gunman’s attention was elsewhere, Charlie rolled slightly to the left, freeing his right hand, which had been under his buttocks, bringing up the revolver.
The Twilighter gasped, began to turn.
Charlie shot him twice. Once in the side. Once in the head.
The man went over the brink, crashed through some brush, rolled down between the trees, and came to a stop against the broad trunk of a pine, dead before he even had a chance to scream.
Turning onto his stomach, Charlie pulled himself to the edge of the ridge and looked down. Some of Spivey’s people had come out of hiding in response to the rifleman’s shout of triumph. Apparently, not all of them realized their enemy was still alive. Most likely they thought the two subsequent shots had been fired by their own man, to make sure Charlie was dead, and they probably figured the body toppling off the crest was Charlie’s. They didn’t dive for cover again until he shouted, “Bastards,” and squeezed off two rounds from the revolver. Then, like a pack of rats smelling a cat, they scuttled into safe dark places.
He loosed the remaining two rounds in the revolver, not expecting to hit anyone, not even taking aim, intending only to frighten them and force them to lie low for a while.
“I got both of them!” he shouted. “They’re both dead. How come they’re both dead if God’s on your side?”
No one below responded.
The shouting winded him. He waited a moment, drawing several deep breaths, not wanting them to hear any weakness in his voice. Then he shouted again: “Why don’t you stand up and let God stop the bullets when I shoot at you?”
No answer.
“That would prove something, wouldn’t it?”
No answer.
He took several long, slow breaths.
He tried flexing his left hand, and the fingers moved, but they were still numb and stiff.
Wondering whether he had killed enough of them to make them turn back, he did a little arithmetic. He had killed two on the ridgetop, one on the trail, three down in the meadow where they had huddled around the Jeep and the snowmobiles. Six dead. Six of ten. How many did that leave in the woods below him? Three? He thought he’d seen three others down there: another woman, Kyle, and the man who had been in front of Kyle, toward the end of the line. But wouldn’t at least one of them have stayed behind with Mother Grace? Surely she wouldn’t have remained alone at the cabin. And she wouldn’t have been able to come up here, on such an arduous hike. Would she? Or was she there among the trees right now, only sixty or seventy yards away, crouching in the shadows like an evil old troll?
“I’m going to wait right here,” he shouted.
He fished half a dozen cartridges out of a jacket pocket and, hampered by having only one good hand, reloaded the revolver.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to move,” Charlie called down to them. “You’ll have to stretch your muscles, or you’ll cramp up.” His voice sounded eerie in the snowy stillness. “You’ll cramp up, and you’ll slowly start freezing to death.”
The anesthetizing shock of being shot was beginning to wear off. His nerves began to respond, and the first dull pain crept into his shoulder and arm.
“Anytime you’re ready,” he shouted, “let’s test your faith. Let’s see if you really believe God is on your side. Anytime you’re ready, just stand up and let me take a shot at you, and let’s see if God turns the bullets away.”
He waited half a minute, until he was sure they weren’t going to respond, and then he holstered his revolver and eased away from the crest. They wouldn’t know he had left. They might suspect, but they couldn’t be sure. They would be pinned down for half an hour, maybe longer, before they finally decided to risk continuing their ascent. At least he hoped to God they would. He needed every minute he could get.
With the dull pain in his shoulder rapidly growing sharper, he belly-crawled all the way across the flat top of the ridge, moving like a crippled crab, and didn’t stand up until he had reached the place where the land sloped down and the deer trail headed off through the trees.
When he tried to rise, he found his legs were surprisingly weak; they crumpled under him, and he dropped back to the ground, jarring his injured arm—Christ!—and felt a big black wave roaring toward him. He held his breath and closed his eyes and waited until the wave had passed, refusing to be carried away by it. The pain was not dull any longer; it was a stinging, burning, gnawing pain, as if a living creature had burrowed into his shoulder and was now eating its way out. It was bad enough when he was perfectly still, but the slightest movement made it ten times worse. However, he couldn’t just lie here. Regardless of the pain, he had to get up, return to Christine. If he was going to die, he didn’t want to be alone in these woods when his time came. Christ, that was inexcusably negative thinking, wasn’t it? Mustn’t think about dying. The thought is father to the deed, right? The pain was bad, but that didn’t mean the wound was mortal. He hadn’t come this far to give up so easily. There was a chance. Always a chance. He had been an optimist all his life. He had survived two abusive, drunken parents. He had survived poverty. He had survived the war. He would survive this, too, dammit. He crawled off the plateau, onto the deer trail. Just over the edge of the crest, he grabbed a branch on a spruce and pulled himself upright at last, leaning on the trunk of the tree for support.
He wasn’t dizzy, and that was a good sign. After he had taken several deep breaths and had stood there against the tree for a minute, his legs became less rubbery. The pain from the wound did not subside, but he found that he was gradually adjusting to it; he either had to adjust or escape it by surrendering consciousness, which was a luxury he could not afford.
He moved away from the tree, gritting his teeth as the fire in his shoulder blazed up a bit higher, and he descended along the deer path, moving faster than he had thought he could, though not as fast as he had come down the first time, when Christine and Joey had been with him. He was in a hurry, but he was also cautious, afraid of slipping, falling, and further injuring his shoulder and arm. If he fell on his left side, he would probably pass out from the subsequent explosion of pain, and then he might not come around again until Spivey’s people were standing over him, poking him with the barrel of a gun.
Sixty or seventy yards below the ridge, he realized he should have brought the machine gun with him. Perhaps there were a couple of spare magazines of ammunition on the dead gunner’s body. That would even the odds a bit. With a machine
gun, he might be able to set up another ambush and wipe out all of them this time.
He stopped and looked back, wondering if he should return for the weapon. The rising trail behind him looked steeper than he remembered it. In fact the climb appeared as challenging as the most difficult face on Mount Everest. He breathed harder just looking up at it. As he studied it, the path seemed to grow even steeper. Hell, it looked vertical. He didn’t have the strength to go back, and he cursed himself for not thinking of the machine gun while he was up there; he realized he wasn’t as clearheaded as he thought.
He continued downward.
Twenty yards farther along the trail, the forest seemed to spin around him. He halted and planted his legs wide, as if he could bring the carousel of trees to a stop just by digging in his heels. He did slow it down, but he couldn’t stop it altogether, so he finally proceeded cautiously, putting one foot in front of the other with the measured deliberation of a drunkard trying to prove sobriety to a cop.
The wind had grown stronger, and it made quite a racket in the huge trees. Some of the tallest creaked as the higher, slenderer portions of their trunks swayed in the inconstant gusts. The woody branches clattered together, and the shaken evergreen needles clicked-rustled-hissed. The creaking grew louder until it sounded like a thousand doors opening on unoiled hinges, and the clicking and rustling and hissing grew louder, too, thunderous, until the noise was painful, until he felt as if he were inside a drum, and he staggered, stumbled, nearly fell, realized that most of the sound wasn’t coming from the wind in the trees but from his own body, realized he was hearing his own blood roar in his ears as his heart pounded faster and faster. Then the forest began to spin again, and as it spun it pulled darkness down from the sky like thread from a spool, more and more darkness, and now the whirling forest didn’t seem like a carousel but like a loom, weaving the threads of darkness into a black cloth, and the cloth billowed around him, settled over him, and he couldn’t see where he was going, stumbled again, and fell—