The problem was that they had been focused solely on themselves. On their escape. On their survival. They hadn’t given enough consideration to exactly what was hunting them. They had never actually seen their enemy, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Coburn didn’t know enough to piece together a picture. So what did he know?
They came at night, but their movements weren’t restricted to the nighttime. Shore had been killed during the day. They’d been in the dense forest at the time. Did that have to do with an element of concealment? Was there an aversion to light or did they simply not want to risk being seen?
They consumed their prey. No doubt about it. The bite marks didn’t resemble those of an animal, however. In fact, judging by Vigil’s hand and Shore’s remains, the dentition almost appeared human.
They had clawed appendages. He had seen the deep scratches in the wood on the window sill and the plywood sheet, in the hand- and footprints in the snow. He’d heard them clattering on the roof. Seen the damage they inflicted.
They had fur. He remembered the faint impressions on the accumulation beside the prints and the dried clumps still down here in the pitch black with him, assuming they did indeed shed them.
They were capable of both bi- and quadripedal locomotion. In his lone, fleeting glimpse of them, he had mistaken them for bears, even after they rose to their full height and extended their arms. And especially when they dropped low to the ground and charged the house.
Their mental acuity was staggering. Regardless of the physical evidence, they didn’t hunt like animals. They had outthought and outmaneuvered Coburn’s party at every turn. They’d anticipated and outflanked every movement. They’d even used both Vigil and Shore in an effort to cripple their prey with fear and doubt.
All indications pointed to some kind of amalgam of man and animal. Or at least some kind of animal with seemingly human attributes. But he couldn’t think of a single living organism that fit all of the criteria.
There was one way to find out, though.
One conclusive way to know for sure.
That is, if he could still trust his sense of smell.
Coburn opened his backpack and reached inside. It was a moment’s effort to find what he was looking for.
Click.
Click.
The small flame erupted from the metal shaft of the lighter and cast a flickering glow across stone walls spattered with frozen blood.
But the body he had expected to find was gone.
* * *
He had smelled the fresh blood aging and the first phases of early decomposition from where he sat in the complete darkness. He had occupied his mind trying to estimate the sheer volume of blood required to produce the scents. Even with his extensive experience in some of the busiest surgical trauma suites in the country, his best guess had fallen well shy.
A black puddle had formed in the middle of the floor and now supported a layer of discolored ice. The dirt had turned to mud and frozen in choppy ridges transected by distinct rows of claw marks. Gobs of tissue and bone were congealed to the wall with blood and hair. Not just bone. There were teeth, too. The majority were broken and obscured by blood, but he would have sworn they looked human. The bullet must have struck whatever it was in the jaw and sprayed the ruined mandible straight up the wall. Based on the copious amounts of blood leading out into dry storage, it might have survived long enough to stagger off into the forest, but it definitely wouldn’t have made it very far.
Coburn concentrated on his sense of hearing, combing through the silence for the slightest sound to suggest his attackers were still out there. Minutes passed before he finally felt confident enough to crawl toward the center of the room. Every joint in his body ached from being compressed against the wall in the bitter cold, those that he could still feel, anyway. His toes were lost to him and his fingers were well on their way to joining them. The tip of his nose and his cheeks had passed from numbness into a world of hurt.
He had to set down his rifle in order to cup the flame from the draft as he neared the openings to either side. To his left, the tunnel was swallowed by darkness mere feet inside the mouth. The visibility was better to his right. He could see straight through the trampled saplings and the opposite doorway, all the way to the barricade. Everything was limned with gray from what little dawn permeated the storm clouds. He was only able to follow the trail of blood with his eyes as far as the main room.
There was no sign of anything out there.
The lighter flagged when a gust of wind battered the weathered wall in the adjacent room. A clump of snow fell through the rusted tin roof and nearly scared him to death when it hit the ground in front of him.
He brought the flame closer to his face and reveled in the momentary warmth on his bare skin. The time had come to make a decision.
Live or die. It was as simple as that.
And Coburn chose to live.
He steeled his resolve and made a decision.
He couldn’t stay here any longer. It was time to go.
Better to take his chances out there in the blizzard than to wait for them to return to finish him. He couldn’t hold them off forever. Out there, he at least had a sporting chance. He just needed to break the situation down to its most simplified components and formulate a plan.
First decision…There were two possible initial moves: one doorway led back into the house, the other into a tunnel that obviously opened somewhere higher up the mountainside. If he chose the house, he would then have a choice of three possible exits: the front door, the window, or the hole in the roof, all of which gave upon an open field with direct access to roughly two-hundred-seventy degrees of untamed forest and countless paths that led in any number of unknown directions. If he chose the tunnel, he would be slithering into a confined space without the ability to turn around quickly if he needed to. He would be crawling through his friend’s frozen blood in complete darkness without the slightest clue as to where he would come out. The former gave him seemingly limitless options; the latter only one, not to mention the fact that the prospect of choosing it was positively mortifying.
One was without a doubt a better option than the other.
His hunters had known exactly what they would do before they even knew themselves.
If these animals were utilizing their higher faculties to outsmart him, then maybe he could use his baser instincts to outmaneuver them.
Boil it down to the essentials. Don’t overthink it. Don’t strategize.
What was his ultimate goal?
Survival.
How was that achieved?
Escape.
How was that accomplished?
By distancing himself from his hunters.
How did he do that?
By placing one foot in front of the other and establishing forward momentum.
But in which direction?
His bearings were skewed and he didn’t have a compass. He was roughly eleven thousand feet above sea level. The only answer that made any kind of sense wasn’t a cardinal direction. He needed to descend in altitude.
Keep it simple.
He needed to go down.
And from there?
He needed to find help.
There. He had a plan. An elementary plan that required no thought, no strategy.
Keep moving forward.
Continue heading down.
Find help.
Basic. The kind of directions a dog could be trained to follow.
But even that plan still required that he make a crucial decision. Right here and now.
Into the tunnel or into the house?
Left or right?