Coburn shivered.
Or had it been carved by someone from the inside, trying to get out?
The soil was black and still held the shapes of the objects that had been frozen to it, and ahead…were those claw marks? No. They were too far apart. And too deep. He reached in as far as he could and aligned his fingers with the gouges, then quickly retracted his hand. Close to a match. If anything, his fingers might have been a little smaller than those that had left the marks. The dirt. The dirt was scraped upward toward the opposite end of the tunnel…as though someone had curled his fingers into the dirt as he was being dragged out the tunnel from behind.
He imagined a man backing into the tunnel with all of the food he had left. Stacking the rocks in front of him so he couldn’t be seen. Waiting in the darkness. Scratching sounds from behind him. Dirt skittering down the earthen tube. The movement of shadows in front of him through the cracks between the stones. The attack comes from behind, from within the mountain itself. A scream echoes in the cellar-
Coburn backed out of the tunnel as fast as he could. He didn’t even think about restacking the stones. He just turned around, held the lighter out in front of him, and-
Stopped right where he was.
His breath caught in his chest.
All around the small entryway. Names. Names and dates. Carved into the wood. Some of them reasonably fresh. Some of them so old they were nearly indistinguishable from the faded planks. There had to be dozens of them.
John Michael Watkins, 2/5/74.
James Aaron Peters, 11-9-97.
Thaddeus Wilson Waller, December the Twelfth, the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-six.
William Clayton Rayburn, Jan 4, 1952.
The list went on and on. Coburn lost track of them when he saw the large words carved above them. Much deeper than all of the rest. As though the same hands that had added their names to the list had gone over the letters again for emphasis.
THEY COME AT NIGHT.
* * *
“Todd!” Coburn shouted as he burst into the main room and rounded the corner into the bedroom. “We have to get out of here! We’re running out of time! We can’t stay-!”
A hand closed over his mouth and he was bodily pulled into the shadows.
“Shh!” Baumann whispered into his ear. “Not a sound. You hear me? Not a sound.”
Coburn nodded and Baumann released his grip.
The fire was now dead. Only its scent remained, and even that wouldn’t last much longer with as hard as the frigid breeze was blowing straight through the window. Snow had already begun to accumulate on the ring of stones. The flakes hissed when they alighted on the charcoaled logs.
Baumann pantomimed for Coburn to get his rifle, then sighted the outside world through his scope. Coburn retrieved his Remington, aligned his aim with Baumann’s, and zoomed in on the distant forest through the storm. He could barely see the trunks of the trees with all of the snowflakes crossing his field of view. The canopy was buried in white. The detritus was hidden beneath the white. Everything was white, except for the bark on the trunks and the branches in the lee of the wind. And the shadows. Dark shadows that clung to the shrubs and cowered under the lowest branches. He was about to ask Baumann what he was supposed to be seeing when the shadows moved.
Coburn held his breath and struggled to keep his scope steady.
There it was again. Farther to the right this time. Behind the frozen skeleton of a scrub oak. Nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings.
“By my count, there are at least two more out there,” Baumann whispered. “They know we’re here.”
“I’ve got news for you. They’ve been ahead of us the whole time. They always knew that this was where we’d go.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because they’ve done this many, many times before.”
Baumann was silent for a long moment.
“What did you find back there?” he finally asked.
So Coburn told him.
* * *
“They come at night,” Baumann whispered. “I don’t get it. They’re already out there right now. And unless I completely lost track of time, the sun hasn’t set yet.”
“We both know what it means,” Coburn whispered. He bit the wrapper of a Slim Jim and tore it open with his teeth so that he didn’t have to remove his eye from the sight. He tried not to think about the side of the wrapper that had been frozen to the ground in a puddle of blood as it soaked into the dirt. Tried not to taste it. They didn’t have enough water that they could afford to waste a drop of it to clean it off. And they surely didn’t want to see the expiration date, either. “It means they’ll be coming for us soon.”
The temperature was falling by the second as the sky darkened behind the clouds, but at least they’d rekindled the fire. There wasn’t much point in trying to hide anymore. Whoever was out there knew where they were and undoubtedly already knew exactly how they would approach. After all, they’d been doing it for nearly a century, which brought to mind the question neither could answer with any kind of certainty.
“Who’s coming for us?” Baumann whispered. “Who do you think is out there?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Coburn thought about the claw marks on the board that had covered the window and on the window sill following Vigil’s abduction, the tracks in the snow where some large animal had crouched to consume the severed hand, the clumps of fur in the cellar and the pure savagery with which Shore had been killed mere feet from him. “But I think we’re dealing with a what, not a who.”
“Don’t try to tell me bears-”
“No, not bears.”
“Then what? What kind of animal could tie a hand to a nail by a tendon or make a display of Vigil’s head like that?”
“I don’t know.” Coburn took a bite of the beef stick and savored the flavor, if not the texture. “But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
* * *
The shadow of Mt. Isolation fell heavily upon the clouds as the sun abandoned them to the dusk. The blizzard intensified its efforts in response, filling the air with thick flakes the size of dimes. The wind screamed in delight and hurled them faster and faster, first one way and then the other. The accumulation swept up the side of the house and spilled over the windowsill, where it melted into a muddy puddle by the fire. Baumann knelt to the side of it, his back against the interior wall abutting the hillside, the fire to his right, his rifle directed out the window at such an angle that to see him would mean to be in his sights. He’d smeared mud on his face and his hands, and did his best to keep the snow from accumulating on his scope as it blew at him. Half a stick of jerky hung from his mouth like a cigar.
Coburn sat in the doorway, which he had been forced to widen with several solid kicks to collect more wood for the fire. He could barely feel its warmth, but that was enough. He needed to stay sharp and the cold helped him focus his senses. After all, he was tasked with covering the barricaded front door, the hole in the roof through which the boughs of the pine had grown, and now the door to the storage rooms and the tunnel to God-knows-where in their depths. His magazine was stuffed to the gills. He had an open box of ammunition in the left hip pocket of his jacket and eight more rounds lined up on the ground beside him. Just under two seconds to reload meant he needed to shoot first and ask questions later. It also meant that he couldn’t afford to miss.