Cole then sidestepped out of the bear hug and pushed the injured man forwards across the room towards Albright.
In the blink of an eye, Cole had reached down to the floor and snatched up Albright’s fallen pistol, aiming it across the room towards Albright and pressing the trigger once, twice, three times.
Albright had recovered from the blows he had received, and saw Cole raise the gun. At the same time, he saw Steinmeier’s big body hurtling towards him. Intended by Cole as a distraction, Albright instead used it to his advantage, pulling Steinmeier across him even as Cole started firing.
Steinmeier’s body shook from the impact, all three bullets entering his gut, blood spurting reflexively from his mouth, and then Albright pushed the body back away from himself towards Cole.
As Cole jinked to the side to avoid the impact, gun moving around Steinmeier’s incoming body, Albright used the brief opportunity and turned to the window, smashing it as he jumped out from the third floor of the house to the garden below.
56
Cole got to the window as he saw Albright pick himself up from the thick snowdrift that lay against the side of the house.
The man looked up and smiled before running off towards the tree line, and before Cole could clear the barrel of the gun over the window frame, Albright had disappeared into the shadows of the garden.
No you fucking don’t, Cole promised, and then he swung himself out of the window, falling three storeys to the snowdrift below. He was out in seconds, and he took off after the man as fast as he had ever run in his life.
As Cole entered the tree line, he could hear the first faint sound of sirens in the distance. He knew the area would soon be crawling with police, security and other emergency services; but he couldn’t let that distract him.
He saw the line of tracks in the snow ahead of him, ploughing straight through the trees. Cole had been hunting with Stefan before here, and turned to the right, taking the high ground.
57
Albright was out of breath, panting hard, pushing himself as hard as he could. He was going fast, he had a big head start, he had to be a long way in front, hadn’t he?
As he whipped through the trees, he knew he could not slow down; Cole was following, and was going to kill him.
He had been running all out for what seemed like hours, but what was in fact only minutes, and had still not heard any sign of Cole behind him. Could he afford to slow down, to take it easy? No. Not until he was well and truly safe.
He could see the trees widening out up ahead, the ground sloping down at an ever-steepening angle until it opened up onto a hillside, and he started to wonder what he should do. Should he just try and hide in the trees, hope Cole couldn’t find him? Or just keep running, even going out into the open, and just hope he could keep his advantage?
He never had time to think of an answer, as a movement caught his eye and he turned his head to see Mark Cole hurtling towards him.
58
Cole’s body made hard contact with Albright’s, and he could tell the wind had been knocked out of the man.
Cole had rolled off to the side, and was surprised when Albright caught him in the face with the heel of his boot, kicking up at Cole from the floor.
Cole staggered back, and Albright took the opportunity to get back to his feet, pulling out a Gerber combat knife as he did so.
Cole saw the draw, and angled his body away as Albright slashed horizontally towards him. He slashed through back the other way, and again Cole narrowly avoided it.
When he came back through from the other direction, Cole was ready for it, and managed to parry the knife arm, then grabbed the man and pulled him forwards onto a head-butt.
The force of the blow broke the plastic nose guard instantly, and Cole saw how the nose itself then sloughed off, leaving an ugly, gaping wound right in the middle of Albright’s face. In addition to the empty eye socket and the damaged, shaven head, the man looked grotesque.
Cole slipped then, losing his balance on the steep ground, and the two men toppled over. Albright lost his grip on the knife, and both men grabbed each other as they went down, their momentum carrying them down the slope.
They eventually broke through the tree line onto the steep hillside, their bodies now rolling and turning at an ever increasing speed as they tumbled downwards, bouncing from side to side off tree stumps and rocks whilst all the while keeping a death-grip hold on one another.
The two men tried to punch, bite, head-butt and gouge each other as they rolled at sickening speed down the snow-covered hill, but they were moving too fast to do any real damage to each other.
Eventually, however, the ground started to even out and their momentum slowed. Cole was the first to react, turning their bodies so that Albright was underneath as they glided to a stop by a clump of rocks sticking up through the deep snow.
Albright struggled underneath, but Cole dropped his head down heavily onto the man’s face again, dazing him even more. Moving quickly, Cole pinned Albright down with his legs, and reached across to the rock pile, picking up a big, heavy, metallic lump.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Cole yelled as he brought the rock down onto the face of his family’s killer. ‘Fuck … ing … son … of … a … bitch!’ he yelled, punctuating each word with another massive strike of the rock. He kept repeating the phrase again and again, not stopping even when the man’s head split open like an over-ripe melon, not even when his remaining eye bulged out of his head and the bloody grey mass of his brain started to leak out of the back of his smashed skull.
Cole kept on smashing the rock down even after there was no head left at all, and he was just beating it uselessly down into the bloody, greasy snow.
Eventually, exhaustion caused him to stop, and he slumped forward, chest heaving.
And then he remembered his family, and all that had happened, and he reared backwards and screamed across the mountains.
59
Ten minutes later, Cole was back upstairs in the house.
Sarah, Ben and Amy had all been executed with head shots from close range, but he had to be sure. He couldn’t simply leave the scene, escape without first checking.
But within seconds, it was clear there was nothing to check. They were dead, 9mm rounds having entered and exited their heads and blowing their brains all over the walls and floor.
Cole wept uncontrollably as he gathered the bodies together, cradling them in his arms, holding them together, a family again, reunited at last.
Tears rolled down his cheeks, and his body convulsed with the pain of his emotions; and still he held the bodies, held them close, as if his own warmth, his love, would somehow bring them back to life.
And then he heard the pained words from behind him, and he turned his head.
Stefan Steinmeier sat propped in the corner of the room, still alive, hands uselessly trying to push the grey, looped sausage of his ragged intestines back into his body as he choked on his own blood.
‘I … I’m sorry,’ he said, spitting blood from between gritted teeth with each word.
Cole looked at his old friend with pure, unbridled hatred, unable to speak, to respond. Sorry? The gut shots were nothing. Stefan was going to be a lot more than sorry, Cole decided, that was fucking guaranteed.
But as Cole finally released his family and began to stand, he saw Steinmeier smile, and Cole suddenly realized that the fatally injured man wasn’t talking about what he had done, but about something he was about to do.