“Jesus!” Coburn gasped and stumbled backward. His heel caught on Baumann’s foot and he landed squarely on his rear end.
There it was on the crusted snow in front of him. Or at least what was left of it. The hand. Vigil’s hand. The index and middle fingers were mere nubs where the jagged bones protruded from the tattered skin. The webbing by the thumb was gone and the skin of the digit itself had been turned inside out in the process of peeling it off. The meat at the base of the palm was gone, allowing the gravel-like bones of the wrist to poke through.
The edges of the wounds…all of them…the ridges…the ridges of teeth were clearly evident.
“We were right there on the other side of the wall,” Coburn sputtered as he struggled back to his feet. “Right on the other side of the wall the whole time. And we didn’t hear a thing. Not a goddamn thing!”
He imagined a shadow shaped like a man removing Vigil’s hand from the nail on the door, squatting down out of the wind, and bringing the fingers to its mouth-
There. In the snow.
The wind had done its best to obliterate them, but he could still see them in the center of a mess of bone chips. Two partial footprints and a handprint. Bare. Human. The balls of the feet and the toes, as though it had crouched like a baseball catcher and braced one hand on the ground as it crunched through skin and bone alike. The edges of the prints were indistinct, almost feathered or brushed, like mountain lion or bobcat tracks…as though the appendages that had made them were covered with fur.
“We need to keep moving!” Baumann said.
“What in the name of God is out here?” Shore said.
“I sure as hell don’t intend to stick around long enough to find out.”
“Those can’t be real tracks,” Coburn said. “Someone has to be messing with us, trying to confuse us.”
“Well they’re doing a bang-up job so far,” Shore said.
“Like they’ve done this before…”
“It’s now or never, boys,” Baumann said. “We’re too exposed standing out here in the open like this.”
“There are too many places for them to hide in the forest,” Shore said.
“That can work both ways,” Coburn said.
“Whatever’s out there could sneak right up on us and we wouldn’t see them until it’s too late.”
“Better moving targets than sitting ducks,” Baumann said. “We don’t have time to debate this! Get going!”
“I’m not going first!”
“Christ Almighty, Blaine!” Baumann turned to his right toward the hidden path that had initially led them here. “You’d better watch my back then!”
Coburn caught up with Baumann a dozen feet from the buried wall of pine trees. He could barely see their trunks behind their sagging branches, let alone anything that might have been hiding in the shadowed scrubs and brambles.
“Let me in between you,” Shore said, shouldering in front of Coburn.
Coburn turned around, seated his rifle against his shoulder, and swept his barrel across the clearing. The decrepit house was little more than a grayish blur through the blizzard. The wind had already begun to erase their path.
No sign of pursuit.
He turned back to the woods and hurried to rejoin the others.
Single file, they ducked under the canopy and out of the wind, and entered the dark forest.
* * *
Nothing looked familiar.
Coburn wished he’d been paying closer attention to his surroundings on the way in. It was readily apparent that they were following some sort of trail, but it would have been comforting to recognize even a single deformed tree or bend in the path. Something to confirm that they were heading in the right direction. Anything. Anything at all.
The enraged wind screamed in the distance, but reached them only as an attenuated breeze, barely strong enough to sweep the snow across the ground and make the branches overhead sway. Pine needles rustled and bark scraped. Snow fell in clumps onto the uneven accumulation, which wasn’t even half as deep as it had been in the meadow they just left. The dead leaves still crackled underfoot.
While he was grateful for the forest’s protection from the blizzard, he would have appreciated even what little sun graced the world without. A deep twilight reigned beneath the canopy; a perpetual state of shadow drifting around the trunks and through the scrub oak and saplings, forever trapped on the mountainside. It felt like he was being watched from every direction at once, and for all he knew he was. There were countless places to hide and the tramping sounds of their passage would easily mask a stealthy approach. His toes ached, his eyes stung, and he could feel the mucus freezing on his upper lip, but couldn’t bring himself to lower his stare from his rifle to wipe it away. His scope was useless and his normal sight alone couldn’t penetrate the deep pools of darkness. Still, he alternated walking backward so he could cover the forest behind them and jogging to catch back up when he lagged. At a guess, they’d come maybe half a mile and already the muscles in his legs were burning from trudging through the snow.
He was just about to turn and attempt to catch up again when he backed right into Shore, who grabbed him by the straps of his backpack and pulled him behind the trunk of a pine.
“What-?”
Shore clasped his gloved hand over Coburn’s mouth.
He swatted his friend’s hand away and peered around the tree. Baumann’s footprints terminated about five paces ahead, where he had ducked from the path to the right, behind a juniper bush. Coburn followed Baumann’s sightline deeper into the forest-
He ducked back behind the trunk and pressed his back against the bark. His breath blossomed in rapid clouds from his chapped lips.
Had he really seen…?
No.
No. He couldn’t have…could he?
His pulse thudding in his ears, Coburn lowered himself to his knees, leaned around the tree, and sighted down the dark path. There. About fifty feet away along a rare straight stretch, where the dense forest absorbed the snow-blanketed trail, was what he had at first mistaken with his bare eyes for a man kneeling on the ground.
The rifle trembled in his grasp.
Two femora, the upper leg bones, had been staked into the snow, mid-thigh-deep. They had been stripped of the muscle and fat, clear down to the knots of tendons and connective tissue over the trochanters and femoral necks, where the bones still articulated with the acetabula of the hip bones. The northern sides of the bones were rimed with ice, while the remainder was crusted black and brown. The viscera had been removed from the lower abdomen and the brim of the pelvis tipped at such an angle that it functioned like the seat of a chair. And there…sitting on that seat…was Vigil’s head.
* * *
Snow had accumulated on his ebon hair, which was crusted to his forehead by a brick-red smear of blood. The tips of his ears and nose were black with frostbite, his ordinarily caramel-colored skin faded to a pallid bluish-white. His eyes were dark recesses, save for the lower crescents of the sclera beneath his eyelids. His lips were plump and purple, his jaw askew like he was attempting a conspiratorial wink. The severed tendons and vessels from his throat dangled through the outlet of the pelvis, into which the circumference of his neck had been fitted like a collar.
The macabre tableau was just sitting there in the middle of the path, on a pristine sheet of white snow, without a single footprint leading up to it. Put on display with the sole intention of being viewed from this exact point. Staked into the ground where they would have missed it entirely had they chosen any other path. Placed where whoever had done this knew they would eventually end up.
They were being hunted.