Then he rolled and pushed himself up to standing, knowing what it felt like to be hit by a bus. Keeping the thicker logs that formed the cabin wall between himself and the shooter, he ducked and twisted the doorknob and threw the door open.
“Sheriff!” he announced.
Where the hell was Brandon?
Now, in the very far distance, came the mosquito buzz of approaching snowmobiles. Both teams were converging on the compound from a mile out.
Walt struggled for breath. Every movement caused blinding pain. He stood, banged off the door, throwing it fully open to make sure no one was hiding behind it, and then pushed himself into the doorway, fell to his knees and rocked forward, his gun gripped in both hands.
Clear.
The.45 was on the floor to his right. He grabbed it, ejected the magazine, and tossed both halves out the door into the snow.
He used the furniture as screens, flipping the only table and hiding behind it, then working past the woodstove to the only doorway. Trying to draw a deep breath and then regretting it for the agony it caused.
He turned the doorknob. Tested the door. Swung it open.
A bunk room: two bunk beds, meeting in the near corner. No closets. Clothes on hooks on the wall.
Clear.
Open window, the blind undulating in waves, still in motion.
Walt poked his head out the window, then quickly back inside. Right. Left.
Clear.
He followed out the window.
A confusion of tracks in the snow.
But one line of tracks called to him above all others, leading directly to a shed fifteen yards behind the cabin. The right leg was wounded and trailing badly, dragging behind, the left leg doing all the work. Walt thought this explained why the shooter-Coats?-had not rushed the cabin’s front door to finish the kill.
Walt pulled down the night vision goggles and the landscape before him came alive in monochromatic green and black. But it was as if someone had turned on a searchlight: he could see not only the shed and the corral next to it but well beyond to a stack of chopped wood.
His weapon extended, his arm braced and steadied, he punched his way through the thick snow toward the shed, the beat of his heart painful in his bruised chest.
Where was Mark? Did they have him in the shed? Had Coats moved toward his bargaining chip?
A sound from behind turned him. He dropped to one knee, swung the gun around, and took aim: the figure stood over six feet tall, with shoulders as wide as a truck. Walt blinked, and he eased his finger off the trigger.
A bear. A big bear raised onto its hind legs. Ten, fifteen yards. Even through the goggles, Walt saw the foaming saliva spilling from its mouth. An angry bear. A mad bear. And then: the dark spot on its shoulder. A wounded bear.
He could try to kill the bear, though it would take most of the contents of his magazine, and the bear would likely maul him before actually succumbing. It took a perfect heart shot to drop a bear. Walt had heard stories of direct hits to the skull that glanced off without effect. He turned and ran for the shed. He didn’t need a rearview mirror to know the bear was following at a gallop.
He blew through the shed door and slammed it shut, turning and once again dropping to one knee. The eerie black and green played out through the goggles, depicting a garage and slaughterhouse in one. It was cluttered with tools and sacks, tires and lumber. An enormous dead cow hung from a block and tackle, its long black tongue swollen and drooping toward a dirt floor where a slimy mass of afterbirth and a fetal calf lay cut open and splayed. The smell was suffocating-not even the cold could freeze out death.
The entire wall shook behind him as the bear collided. Past the hanging cow was an old tractor or truck on blocks, reduced to a steel skeleton and surrounded by parts. He heard the wheeze of his own painful breathing and then another crash as the bear bid for entry. The thing hit the door so hard that a shovel fell from the wall and clanged into some fuel canisters.
Then silence.
The front half of the rectangular shed was clear, meaning if Coats was in here he was hiding back amid the remains of the tractor. Walt stood and moved carefully forward, keeping his back to the wall, staying as close to it as possible, without getting his feet caught in the tangle of clutter. Several seconds had passed without an effort from the bear, but Walt found himself stealing glances in that direction, where the door hardware was now splintered and partially torn from the jamb. He crept a few more paces forward in the churchlike silence.
Glass shattered behind him. Walt turned in the spray and squeezed off two shots, expecting to see Coats, but it was the bear’s giant mitt that swiped at him through the broken window, five grotesque claws tearing through Walt’s shoulder and into his muscle. Walt fell into the dead cow, starting it swinging, slipped in the slime on the floor and scrambled quickly to his feet. By the time he did, there was no sign of the bear, only two splintered holes in the log wall where his wild shots had landed.
The chain holding the swinging dead cow creaked like a clock slowly winding down.
He briefly lifted the goggles, wishing he could do without them, but the difference was astonishing: the shed held only a faint glow of moonlight. Back in the world of green and black, he moved cautiously toward the tractor, stepping toward the center of the room to avoid a pile of clutter.
He stood there, panting from the rush of the bear attack, his shoulder throbbing, working the goggles left to right, searching out the hidden recesses and hiding places while anticipating a surprise attack.
Behind him, the swinging cow slowly twisted and spun as its metronomic ticktocking wound down. Unseen by Walt, the crude knife slice running down the center of the gutted animal twitched open and a human hand slipped out. Then another, this one bearing a bloodied meat hook. The gap widened to reveal the feverish face of Roy Coats.
Walt heard the icy crack of the cow carcass opening and spun.
The meat hook sank into his right hand. His gun dropped. His body followed the sinking weight of the hook as he screamed. The goggles bounced off his head. He crashed onto the dirt floor, his bruised chest sending shock waves of pain racing through his body.
Coats struggled to free the hook, but it had penetrated the meat of Walt’s hand and did not come loose. The two men were briefly connected by the hook, Coats unwilling to let it go, Walt unable to shake it loose. Walt, on his knees, punched out with his left hand and hit something spongy. The man wailed and released the meat hook.
Walt grabbed hold of the hook, gritted his teeth, and pulled it free. With his left hand, he sank the hook into Coats’s chest just as the man raised his head. His left arm was not nearly as strong or coordinated as his right, and, though the hook hit Coats, it did little more than graze him.
Walt punched the man’s leg in the same spot again and then kicked up, as Coats craned forward. He caught the man’s chin and heard the cracking of teeth.
Coats somehow had the hook now. He swung out at Walt, who scrambled back-one swipe, two-narrowly missing him. Walt collided with a pile of junk, and here came the hook again. He blocked it with a length of pipe seized from the pile. The hook came free.
Walt smashed the pipe into the man’s ankle and Coats screamed again.
The shack shook; it sounded like an earthquake.
Walt saw the gun: five feet to his left.
He dove for it.
Coats threw a knee into Walt’s face, stumbled forward and inadvertently kicked the gun away. It disappeared in the darkness into a pile of debris along the wall. Walt scrambled to his knees, swinging the pipe and connecting again. Then he pulled himself to his feet.