Forty feet.
Thirty.
Coburn overtook Baumann with twenty feet to go. His lungs filled with fire and each step sent a painful jolt straight up his legs, but he didn’t dare slow. Not when he reached the house. Not as he passed the front door. Not until he rounded the far end of the house and took up position against the wall to cover Baumann.
Their tracks drew crooked lines across the meadow to the point where they merged and vanished into the trees. The storm was already filling them in and smoothing them over.
He was expecting to see several silhouettes streaking toward them through the snow, but instead he saw…
Nothing.
There was no one in the field.
Coburn nearly sobbed out loud in relief.
“Come on!” Baumann shouted, his voice made hollow by the acoustics inside the old house.
Coburn scanned the tree line one last time, then turned and ran for the window. The second he was close enough, he jumped up onto the sill and tumbled into the decrepit ruins once more.
* * *
The fire had nearly exhausted itself in their absence, waning to glowing embers that produced little more light than heat. Letting it die was just about the most painful thing Coburn had ever endured. As the glow petered, the cold seeped through the walls, rose from the floor, and blew through the holes in the roof with handfuls of snow that accumulated in deepening patches. But they had no other option. If they were to rekindle the flames, they would be sending a giant smoke signal into the sky that would point right back down at them. Assuming they had indeed fooled their pursuit, it would draw them to the homestead like iron filings to a magnet.
The blizzard had obliterated their footprints and leveled the snow, but showed no indication of slowing. The wind still screamed and the wooden planks still rattled against their rusted moorings. Maybe it had warmed a few degrees, although when nightfall descended, they would have no further protection from the plummeting temperatures. Coburn fought the urge to stomp the feeling back into his feet and instead paced the room, peering out through the thin gaps in his wooden prison while Baumann shivered near the window. Todd stood sentry five feet back, nearly in the dying fire, where he couldn’t be separated from the shadows at a distance. He rubbed his cheeks against his shoulders to break up the ice in his burgeoning beard, only to have it reform within minutes as the damp clouds of his exhalations froze to his face.
Coburn could feel the same thing happening to him, but at least his position afforded him a respite from the wind. Unfortunately, it also forced him to look at the points where the walls had been reinforced from within and the deep hole had been exhumed. He tried not to contemplate the circumstances of their creation, for there was a large part of him that wanted nothing more than to crawl into the pit, drag some debris down on himself, and embrace the darkness.
He shook his head to chase that thought away. He couldn’t allow himself to think that way, not if he hoped to survive. Better to focus his mind on keeping himself-keeping both of them-alive.
“We need to find some food,” Coburn whispered.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither am I, but we have to eat. Lord only knows how long we might have to hole up in here.”
“There’s a cheery thought.”
“You know what I mean. What do you have on you?”
“A couple candy bars. Maybe a handful of Skittles. I think anyway. You?”
“Some trail mix. Not a lot else. But I remember seeing some canned food in the dry storage room that could still be edible. Possibly.”
“Probably growing enough botulism to start a Botox clinic.”
“Could be tins of spam.”
“Who would have thought that processed pig snout and hooves would ever sound appealing?”
“You got the window?”
“I don’t have any other pressing engagements at the moment. Just make it quick, okay?”
Coburn shed his backpack, removed a baggie with little more than crumbs at the bottom, and fished around until he found his camp stove lighter. He clicked the trigger several times until a small flame bloomed from the long silver shaft, then ducked through the doorway at the back of the room. The tiny fire flickered in the draft, throwing shifting shadows from the skeletal saplings growing from the floor and reflecting from the glass shards in the snow. He cupped the flame and hurried under the ragged hole in the tin roof and knelt before the stack of cans. They were bereft of labels and shaped so as not to betray the identity of the contents. The rims were rusted together and the metal was the color of burnished brass, but none of them bulged with toxic byproducts, so he shoved them into his pockets and decided to check in cold storage, just in case.
He lowered himself to all fours and crawled through the tiny opening into the stone-lined chamber. It smelled of earth and rot, not unlike a horrific stench he recalled from his youth, of peeling a dead prairie dog from the side of the road. He had barely taken the time to peek inside earlier, what with all the spider webs and the whole death-reek thing, but he figured his survival was worth a few potentially wasted seconds.
He reached inside, brushed the webs out of his way, and crawled in behind the flame, which chased the crinkling strands back up to the earthen roof and made the rifle casings sparkle. The long clumps of desiccated fur were white and gray, and reminded him of a husky or a wolf. The air had to be well below freezing, causing his breath to form almost palpable clouds and the stones to be rimed with frost. He crawled deeper, following the flame, which barely cast a golden aura on the uneven walls. The shadows of the rocks moved with the light as though with peristaltic motion.
The cubby was actually larger than he had at first thought. As he neared the middle, his flame bent back toward him. Another few feet and he could clearly feel the movement of air, like an exhalation from within the mountain itself. He held the lighter up to the rear wall and-
Darkness.
Click.
Click.
Click.
He sighed in relief when the flame blossomed again. Yeah, there was definitely a source of airflow back there.
Shielding the lighter with his gloved hand, he studied the crevices around the stones. There. While most were mortared with crumbling dirt and a webwork of roots, there was a section that appeared to be composed of two large stones merely fitted together and framed by darkness.
Coburn held the lighter off to the side, slid his fingers over the top edge of the upper rock, and pulled it toward him. A cold breeze blew into his face as the stone clattered to the frozen ground. He leaned closer and…
A broad smile spread across his face. There was a backpack behind the rock. A tattered camouflaged number, ripped along the side, its contents spilled out onto the dirt. There had to be a half-dozen Slim Jim beef sticks, a cracked plastic jar of bouillon cubes, and four sealed plastic bottles of what looked like water amid threadbare clothes that had absorbed the color of the earth under them. He chiseled the food out of the dirt, shoveled it into the backpack again, and tried to pull it out of the wall, but it was frozen to the ground. He balled his fist into the stiff fabric and gave another sharp tug. The bag came away abruptly with a tearing sound and nearly sent him sprawling. He barely managed to keep from knocking himself unconscious against the low ceiling of the hollow, which, he could now see, was more than just a cubby carved into the hillside. With the backpack out of the way, he found himself staring into a tunnel that sloped upward into the darkness. It was barely wide enough to squeeze his shoulders through. Probably dug by whatever animal had shed the fur. But why would an animal tunnel into the cellar through the mountain…?