He couldn’t breathe. Was he breathing?
Coburn fell to his knees and sighted through the hole in the roof, waiting for something else to descend upon him. Full of confusion. Seething with anger. He wanted nothing more than to bellow at the top of his lungs and fire repeatedly up into the gap.
“Show yourselves!” he yelled. He felt the pain of the words ripping up his throat, but couldn’t even hear them.
Nothing.
Only the swaying green-needled branches of the ponderosa pines and the snowflakes twirling down from the cold darkness.
He brayed like a wild animal and lowered his eyes to his longtime friend’s remains, crumpled on the dirt in front of him. His first shot had struck Shore in the upper left chest, destroying his clavicle and shoulder girdle. At such close range, the bullet had shattered the scapula and humeral head. There was no blood. The second shot had connected squarely with Shore’s forehead, leaving a jagged, bone-lined crater. Chunks of tissue, gray matter, bone, and hair clung to the wooden slats behind him. And yet there was no crimson starburst spatter.
He stared into Shore’s eyes. Whatever intangible substance had once animated them was long gone. There was ice in the lashes. The lids were swollen. Only the lower halves of the irises showed. Coburn did everything in his power not to look away from the eyes, for they were the only part of his friend that hadn’t been mutilated. There were holes in the cheeks through which the teeth showed. The ears were gone. The neck was little more than sinew and knobby vertebrae. The muscles had been stripped from the remainder of the body. There was no belly, no organs, just a section of lumbar spine to bridge the torso and the pelvis. The meat had been sloppily torn off, leaving the curled nubs of tendons and an ice-crusted layer of frozen blood on connective tissue. What little flesh remained was ragged…ridged…the distinct impressions of teeth immortalized in the blue flesh and the deep white gouges carved into the otherwise rust-colored bones.
“…out of it…”
A voice cut through the ringing, as if from a great distance.
“…damn it, Coburn!”
He glanced up and stared through a sheen of tears. The fire came into focus, and, behind it, Baumann posted at the window, a dark silhouette against the whiteness outside, shouting.
“Snap out of it!”
Coburn focused again on his rifle and pointed it up through the hole. He scooted as far away from the body as he could without losing his vantage point.
His tears froze to his cheeks as he stared up through the gracefully falling snow into the dense canopy.
* * *
“I can’t do this anymore,” Baumann whispered. “What are they doing out there? Why haven’t they attacked yet?”
“They’re just toying with us. Stay focused.”
“We should make a run for it now. While they’re off doing whatever it is they’re doing.”
“They know this forest better than we do. We won’t get far.”
“We aren’t getting anywhere just sitting here.”
Baumann’s logic was inarguable.
A gust screamed across the face of the house.
Coburn was taking his turn at the window. The wind was blowing directly into his face, but at least it cleared the smoke and kept him from roasting in the heat. It had to be getting close to dawn. Or at least close to what passed for dawn in the shadows of the mountains and beneath the blizzard. At a guess, it had been about three hours since Shore’s corpse had been dropped through the roof, which, if his internal clock was remotely accurate, made it somewhere between three and four AM. There hadn’t been so much as a hint of movement and yet they both sensed their enemy out there in the darkness. The night positively crackled with violent potential, an electrical sensation that grew stronger and stronger with each passing second.
Another gust of wind wailed and beneath it…a deep rumble…a vibrating sensation in the earth as much as an audible sound. Coburn couldn’t be quite certain he had heard anything at all.
“Did you hear something?” he whispered.
Baumann paused so long before replying that Coburn started to ask again.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The storm intensified outside. So many flakes filled the air that the forest alternately appeared and disappeared from the blizzard like a mirage. There had to be more than two feet of snow out there. Were it not for the open window and the heat from the fire, the drift might have swept all the way over the side of the house in an effort to bury it. He tried not to think about how easy it would be to simply walk up the snowy slope onto the roof.
The wind screamed again. This time he was certain. Another sound lurked beneath it, a deep bass rumble.
“Tell me you-”
“Yeah. I definitely heard it that time. What do you think-?”
“Shh.”
Coburn thought he saw something move behind the tree line. Damn it. The snow was falling too hard to be able to tell for sure.
It was next to impossible to focus on anything through the scope. The snowflakes looked like bed sheets billowing past; big white blurs that obscured all but the most generalized details.
The wind shrieked. There was the sound again. Louder. Vibrating up from the ground and resonating in his chest like a freight train thundering past in the distance.
More motion at the edge of the forest. This time there was no doubt.
“Movement at twelve o’clock,” Coburn whispered. “One o’clock now. No…eleven…”
“What do you see, Will? Tell me what you-”
A loud roar.
“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”
There was no wind to conceal it this time, no mistaking it.
A deep, feral roar that cut through the night. It grumbled like an avalanche across the clearing and left in its wake a silence so oppressive Coburn feared even to breathe.
“Was that a bear?” Baumann whispered.
“That didn’t sound like any kind of bear to me.”
“Then what in God’s name-?”
“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!” from off to his left. He had barely started to turn his head toward the source when another roar answered from his right.
A third. Directly ahead.
“They’re coming for us,” Baumann said. His voice rose an octave. “They’re coming!”
Another roar. Another. They echoed from the side of the mountain, making their precise origin impossible to pinpoint.
“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”
Shadows against the forest, barely distinguishable from the night. Mere specters darting from behind one trunk to the next.
They were out there.
The entire forest appeared to ripple with movement.
“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”
And another.
One on top of the other.
“rrrRRaaAHHhrrr!”
Frenetic movement.
Then sudden stillness.
Silence settled over the entire valley. Even the wind, it seemed, hesitated to draw breath. The flakes settled like the wings of butterflies onto a placid mat of their brethren.
Coburn’s heartbeat thudded in his ears as he scanned the tree line.
Where did they go? They were just there. Where did they go?
“Talk to me, Will. What do you see?”
“Nothing.” Coburn scanned the forest, first one way, then the other. The trees faded in and out of the storm. “I can’t see a…wait.”
A lone silhouette separated from the shadows. Large and hunched. Low to the ground. Was it a bear? He couldn’t…couldn’t quite tell. He tried to zero in on it through the scope-
Another silhouette materialized from the woods to the right of the first.
Another to its left.
“Fall back,” Coburn whispered.
“What is it? Damn it, Will! What do you-?”
“I said fall back!”
The lead silhouette rose to its full height and extended its long arms out to its sides. Coburn caught but the most fleeting of glimpses, but the silhouette appeared to be made from the blizzard itself. It arched its back and roared up into the sky. Clumps of snow fell from the trees behind it.