Jason dismounted and walked up to the concrete pillars in which bridge supports had been sunk. The base surfaces had been chipped away. Some holes were gouges, some mere pits, but Jason now knew what Lester’s apparition had been doing down here that night.
He ran his light over the concrete. Pointed tools had been used. This was the result of many patient hours of night work.
They used tools. Jason’s imagination again reeled with horror. Iron tools, probably, maybe even pickaxes left behind in the Limerick. Perhaps through the years they had glimpsed men chopping wood or digging in the ground and in their huge dim brains the human spark had connected that activity to this bridge.
Jason ran his light over a man lying splayed against the rocks of the opposite shore. The passengers were scattered among the luggage like thrown rags. Faces, some mangled, some peaceful, swam down the beam of his flashlight. Over all was the foaming rumble of the river.
Abruptly Jason could stomach no more. He walked back to Moon, who was kneeling beside the girl, face stony-blank, his thumb rolling back an eyelid.
“Moon, forget it!” he shouted. “They’re all dead. Let’s get out of here.”
The Indian moved his hand from the girl’s eye to her wrist, feeling for a pulse. Jason shook his shoulder.
“You hear me? We’ll call the Rangers from the lodge.” The Indian lowered the girl’s arm. He stared motionlessly into the river, with such concentration that Jason involuntarily looked to see if anything was there.
Then the Indian stood up with a slow movement, like a fish laboriously surfacing. He opened his coveralls and untied his medicine bundle.
He took out the toe and handed it to Jason. Without a word, he walked down the embankment to the snowmobiles.
“Moon? Moon?” Jason examined the precious toe in the light. “What’s going on?”
The Indian climbed onto his snowmobile and pointed it up the slope. Jason stumbled down the gorge after him.
“Wait a minute, Moon! Why are you giving up your talisman? Answer me, will you?”
Moon roared up the slope toward the road, leaving Jason alone.
With trembling fingers, Jason slipped the toe into a zippered pocket next to his gun and climbed onto his own machine. He shouted at Moon as he drove up, but the wind and the sound of his motor whipped away his voice.
The Indian set a tremendous pace into the wind, but Jason did not mind. All his aches and pains—his sore neck, his injured arm—left him as though exorcised by the toe in his pocket. The greatest of anesthetics is elation, Jason decided. Next to tension, of course. The Indian had given him the toe. It was his.
Those bodies must have jolted the Indian out of his haze. Perhaps they reminded him of Vietnam, a lethal dose of reality if ever there was one. Moon had lost his spirit but gained back his sanity. Not to mention ten thousand tax-free dollars. Jason was euphoric with gratitude. Moon wasn’t such a bad sort—a little confused, but he had many fine qualities. Jason would set the Indian up for life. He would give him a job with his company, a good one, if he wanted it.
They were ascending the road, almost halfway to the lodge, with the Indian still far ahead, when Jason was attacked.
A rock popped out his headlight. Jason decelerated and crouched over his handlebars. He pulled out his pistol and fired into the air to signal Moon.
He swerved into the meadow. The snowmobile jounced off the road and snagged a branch with the front ski, raising a curtain of snow that blinded Jason. The snowmobile hit a sharp hummock, knocking the handlebars into Jason’s chin. He toppled off the seat. Riderless, the machine careened crazily around the meadow and stalled.
Plastered with snow, his head swimming from the blow of the handlebars, Jason got to his hands and knees clutching the pistol in his right hand.
The dog! Watch out for the dog! Woodard had warned him that the dog was like a pilot fish for a shark. His appearance always preceded the beast.
From out of the wind came the pup, its fur stiffened by cold, dodging and retreating from Jason. A rock caught Jason full in the chest and knocked him down. He fired at the dog. The animal yelped and bounded off into the wind.
Jason climbed to his feet and ran toward his snowmobile in a crouching stoop. In the Army they had taught him that constant motion was the key to survival.
Behind him! Jason whirled around. The dog was returning. It turned around again when Jason saw it. Jason aimed and fired with both hands.
With a strangled cough, the dog went a full four feet into the air and came down in two bloody pieces.
Jason slowly turned around, praying that his helmet was strong. In the distance he heard the buzz-saw of Moon’s snowmobile finally coming to his aid.
The Bigfoot materialized behind his snowmobile. Jason aimed with both hands and fired again. The bullet whanged off the metal.
The giant picked up the snowmobile and threw it at Jason. It bounced over the snow and stopped upside down. Jason crouched behind it as light from Moon’s machine spread a pale-yellow glow over the snowy field.
Jason saw clouds of steam from the thing’s breath as it shielded its face from the light. It was the same horned beast both of them had followed for so long. Jason steadied his pistol on one of the snowmobile’s treads.
The beast jumped out of the light. Jason fired into the storm, the gunflash lighting up ice crystals, but it was gone. Like a spirit.
Moon halted his snowmobile at the edge of the road. He slipped the bow from his chest and took an arrow from his quiver. Then he noticed the shattered remains of the dog.
“That was him, Moon. I think he’s headed for the mountain.”
Moon slipped off his helmet and flung it into the snow. The wind made tentacles of his long black hair that grabbed and caressed his lean face.
“Moon, I want to pay you for the toe. Really, I mean it. A deal is a deal. I’ll get a money order soon as we get back to the lodge.”
The Indian kicked at the dog’s remains. Then he walked past Jason, following the fast-filling prints of the giant.
“Moon?” Jason called out uncertainly. “You won’t find him in this storm.”
When the night swallowed him up, Jason saw Moon fitting the arrow to the bow.
“Moon?” Jason called out again. The wind answered.
No, he would not come back. Might as well try to stop the wind. There had been murder in the Indian’s eyes. His spirit had betrayed him. His spirit and that ridiculous hound had been his whole life. His existence was thin ice through which he had finally plunged into empty cold darkness. The bottom was gone, the foundations smashed utterly and finally. Jason knew that feeling. He had barely survived it himself. He did not think the Indian could.
He slipped the gun into his pocket. And then horror chilled him to his very marrow. The toe was gone. It had flipped out when he took out the gun.
Jason went completely to pieces. He clawed through the snow on his hands and knees. He had been here when attacked . . . no, no, he had opened the pocket here! He traced the marks left by the snowmobile, his fingers turning over every toe-sized clump of earth they found. Every few seconds his hands scratched at his coveralls, searching for the telltale lump that would signify that he had only overlooked it, long after reason told him it was gone for good.
The scanning traffic monitored by the radio at Ranger headquarters was concerned mostly with highway-patrol dispatches closing off roads with storm warnings or spotting fallen phone lines. These were normal occurrences for a blizzard. For that reason, Drake was unable to make up his mind whether the interrupted broadcast from Colby signaled a disaster or just more of Jack Helder’s poor luck.