They were being stalked.
17
The flicker and cut of the flashlights were ahead of her. But for these theatrical sharps of light, snipping images from perfect dark, Anna could see nothing. Three feet from where she knelt, the hounds of hell could be waiting, tails wagging in anticipation, and she’d not see them. She closed her eyes to shut out distraction and felt her universe extend on a plane of sound waves. Wind sighed, gentled from its earlier shrieks. Branches of trees discussed the small doings of the creatures beneath in whispers of snow falling from overburdened limbs and the snicker of bark on bark.
Nothing else. The stealthy slip and pad of predators had stopped. Or was never there. Ears swaddled in fleece, brain in fatigue, eyes in darkness: imagining sneaking noises was not beyond the realm of possibility.
With a grunt that she was glad none of the young and agile heard, Anna pushed to her feet and trudged on. Ridley had reached the top of the small knoll. He wasn’t a whole lot bigger than Anna, not more than five-foot-eight or so, and slight of frame. He had skied twenty miles before he was called to the body recovery, yet his movements remained fluid. Anna envied him for a few steps, then let it go. She hadn’t the strength to waste on nonessentials.
“SWITCH OUT!” Ridley hollered.
Anna woke with a start. She was on her feet, she was in position behind the Sked where she was supposed to be, but she’d been walking in a trance. Thirty minutes had elapsed. Ridley and Robin were switching out. Robin would pull the Sked for half an hour, then switch with Bob, so no one got overtired.
As Robin made her way to the rear of the line, Anna knelt in the snow, glad the darkness was there to cover what might have looked more like a collapse than a controlled descent. Light smashed into her face and she threw up an arm to protect herself.
“Sorry,” Ridley said. “How are you doing?”
“Good,” Anna said. “I’m doing good.”
“Eat something,” he said.
“Good idea.” That got the flashlight and his attention off of her and she slumped back into her clothes. She didn’t have anything to eat and, for the first time in what seemed like forever, she wasn’t hungry. Or, if she was, she was too tired to chew and swallow.
Ridley escaped the harness and buckled Robin into it. Robin had never towed a Sked before, but she’d skied a thousand miles with a pack and a rifle on her back so Ridley didn’t bother with much in the way of instruction.
When they’d done, he shined his light over the harness and the Sked, checking that the lines were still secure. “Where’s your light?” he demanded suddenly.
“Bob took it. He wanted to go first.”
“Bob took it,” Ridley said. “God damn him. Here, take mine. God damn him. God damn Adam,” he said and pushed into the darkness toward the wavering speck of light that was the purloined flashlight.
“What’s with Ridley and Adam?” Anna asked.
“Who knows,” Robin replied. Her voice was hollow, as if part of her said the expected words while another, greater part of her was someplace else. Someplace where nightmare was the special of the day.
“How are you doing?” Anna asked. “My strength of ten men is down to about eight-point-five,” she admitted. “Are you okay?”
“Bob took my light.”
The biotech was crying. Anna couldn’t see it but tears were breaking in her words.
“Let me pull the Sked for a while,” Anna said, wondering if she could make good on the offer.
“No.”
Maybe it would be good for Robin to keep working, keep moving, so Anna didn’t argue with her. She didn’t get up either. In a moment she would, she promised herself.
The wind stopped, the trees ceased their muttering and silence as cold and deep as an ice cave poured down. Into that silence came the sound Anna had heard before, stealthy movement in the trees to their left. Robin heard it too. In the glow of the flashlight, Anna saw her head jerk as if on a string; she uttered a strangled cry and began to swing the light in erratic arcs across the landscape. Suddenly illuminated, and as suddenly vanishing back into the dark, trunks and white and rocks flashed by, and for a second Anna felt as if she were falling.
Whether a curious moose, a band of squirrels or a slavering wog was with them, they couldn’t stay where they were. Ridley and Bob were already out of sight. Without light, Ridley couldn’t come back to help them; all he could do was follow Bob’s flashlight the way a lost ship follows the flashing of a buoy. Shaking her head to clear it, Anna blinked a few times. “We better get going.”
Without a word, Robin put her weight behind the harness and pulled. From her kneeling position, Anna pushed on the back of the Sked, breaking it free of where it had frozen to the snow while they’d stopped. A crack, a lurch, and it was moving. A crack, a lurch, and Anna was on her feet moving as well. Robin covered more ground than Ridley had, either not so considerate of Anna slogging behind or more anxious to get back to the main trail and then the bunkhouse.
Anna lifted one foot, then the other, and stayed upright, but the Sked drew away little by little. When the body, the biotech and the light source were several yards ahead, and traveling ever faster, Anna swallowed her pride and called out.
“Hold up. You’re killing me.”
The light stopped. Anna’s breath sawed in her ears as she plowed through the snow. Reaching the Sked, she fell to her knees. She hadn’t spent so much time on her knees since she went to Catholic school. It crossed her mind that a little praying might not hurt anything. With the wog and the munched-up graduate student, the slithery noises and the gigantic paw prints, all she could think of was the dyslexic who stayed up all night worrying about whether or not there was a dog.
She laughed shortly, and the bark of sound made the ensuing silence deeper. Through the thick, black quiet came the distinct crack of a twig snapping and a swish as of a tail sweeping over the snow. Not squirrels; two ounces of rodent didn’t snap twigs. Not a moose; moose were not subtle creatures.
“Stop it!” Robin screamed. Anna squawked, scared half out of her wits by the sudden cry. At first, she thought Robin was yelling at her – fatigue and stretched nerves made the best of women into shrews – but she was yelling at the dark and the trees, at the wog and the windigo, the ice and the night.
The biotech, so seemingly strong and untiring, was breaking apart. Delayed reaction, Anna thought. It had to be; the woman was cool efficiency itself first when photographing the slaughtered wolf, then assisting with the packaging of the slaughtered researcher. She’d held up till near the end. Then she’d started unraveling.
“It’s okay,” Anna said. “We’re going to be okay.” With a huge effort but no grunt, she stood without using her hands to push herself up.
“Let’s go. It’s nothing. The wind plays tricks.”
“It isn’t nothing,” Robin hissed at her. “It’s not fucking nothing!” she yelled at the dark. She began thrusting the flashlight beam into the trees, stabbing, as evil Nazis did with bayonets into haystacks in old movies.
Anna made her way to the front of the sled, the mush of her boots through the snow covering whatever sound the followers in the woods might have been making. She pried the flashlight from Robin’s fingers. “We’ll walk together,” she said. “If the Sked hangs up, I’ll go back. Come on now.”
Robin’s tears metastasized; she sobbed, snot running from her nose, tears freezing in opaque droplets on her cheeks.