No, I know what I should have done. I should have cut off some of the best chunks of meat off those guys and fried it up. Lord knows Johnny’s ass is big enough.
Jesus! Stop thinking like that!
And now night’s coming.
As soon as it starts getting dark, the wind starts to howl and moan. Sometimes, I swear to God it sounds like there’s someone moving around out there in the woods. Sometimes there are sounds like someone dying.
Hey, maybe that’s it.
Maybe it’s me.
Now there’s a thought!
What if I go out there and find someone facedown in the snow. After I cut off a big chunk of meat to cook up, I roll him over and see that it’s
me!
No, no, I gotta keep it together better than this if I’m gonna make it out of here alive. I ain’t doing this for Jodie anymore. Hell, I don’t know if she’s still alive or not. Who the fuck cares?
I’m gonna try to sleep now, and if I die in my sleep, who the fuck cares?
Huh?
I asked you . . . Who the fuck cares?
CLICK
T
he firelight pushed back the darkness, making dense shadows waver and dance across the orange-tinged snow. Dry knots in the wood heated up and exploded, sending sizzling showers of sparks corkscrewing up into the sky where they dissolved against the stars.
At the edge of the forest, five pairs of eyes glowed green in the night. Five pairs of not-human eyes, but one pair was narrowed to mere slits of evil and hunger as they stared at the wreckage of the plane.
I still have the right to disagree with the Council, do I not?
the young male wolf said.
There was a brief silence, filled only with the low hissing of the wind in the trees, the distant crackle of the fire, and the soft thump of snow, falling from heavy-laden branches.
At last the she-wolf spoke.
Yes, you have the right to disagree with Council, but you do not have the right to act contrary to a decision handed down by them. And you can never defy the Decree and remain within our Tribe. However, if you choose to become a Silent Strider . . .
No. I never said I wanted to do that!
The one pair of green eyes stared at the female and narrowed all the more with a deep, burning hatred.
But what if the Council is wrong? What if their decision is foolish?
The she-wolf turned and glared at the young male wolf, making him cringe.
The Council thinks it will not prove so
, the she-wolf replied coolly.
But the Council does not know everything. Perhaps the Council should reconsider. Saving the life of this human could prove harmful to the Tribe. We have worked for generations to keep this forest wild. We certainly do not want to help the humans!
Then one of the other wolves, the largest of the five, stepped between the two.
There will be no more discussion, this wolf said. We are here to make contact with this human, and there will be no harm done to him.
CLICK
I
know I’m losing it now . . . after what I saw . . . or
think
I saw!
What time is it? Let’s see. Okay. A little after two o’clock and still dark, so it must be two in the morning.
That makes it—what? Saturday? Saturday or Sunday? I don’t know for sure. Jesus, I can’t think straight anymore!
I couldn’t sleep at all last night. My stomach’s in a knot of pain, and it’s so cold . . . so fucking cold! I doubt that I’ll ever be warm again!
Okay. Okay. Focus. Concentrate. This is what happened.
I don’t know how I knew they were out there, all right? But something, some primitive sense or something deep inside made me look outside . . . I guess I wanted to make sure nothing was—you know, out there getting after the bodies of my friends.
I had really stoked up the fire earlier, and it was still blazing high when I peeked out around the edge of the plane’s door and saw them.
At first I wasn’t sure how many there were.
Five, maybe six.
They kept shifting in and out of the shadows, their eyes glowing bright green in the firelight. It took me long enough to believe there was anything there, that I wasn’t imagining the whole thing. I didn’t even believe they were real until I saw one of them start toward me.
It was a beautiful animal.
Not large, really. Not as large as I’d ever thought a wolf should be. It had thick, dark fur that was streaked with lighter markings. Some of them—I know this sounds crazy, but some of the markings looked like lightning bolts!
That’s when I was pretty sure I was imagining or dreaming the whole thing.
As it approached me, this wolf kept staring at me, not even blinking. I felt like I was under—I don’t know, some kind of mind control or spell or something. It wasn’t until it was more than halfway to me that I realized it really was a wolf.
There was a whole fucking wolf pack out there in the woods!
And I knew what they wanted.
They wanted
me
.
They wanted to
kill
me and
eat
me.
I knew I had to do something to defend myself, but I was too scared to move. It was like the eyes of this one animal had a hold on me . . . it had hypnotized me and wouldn’t let go. I just stood there, staring like a damned fool at this . . . this thing until it began to . . . to, I don’t know—it began to, like, shimmer and glow in the firelight.
And then—and I know this is gonna sound completely insane—but while I was watching it, another one of the wolves walked up next to it. This wolf had something in its mouth. It took me a second or two to realize that it was a rabbit.
Anyway, this one wolf drops the rabbit down in front of the other wolf. In an instant, before the rabbit could get its bearings and hop away, the other wolf snapped it up into its mouth and bit it almost in half. Blood squirted like ink all over the snow. The rabbit kicked for a second or two, and then lay still.
And then—oh, boy! Now I don’t even believe this myself, but then something
really
weird happened.
I was still watching this whole thing from inside the doorway of the plane when this one wolf started to . . . to
change
.
The first thing I thought was that my eyesight was going bad, or that I was hallucinating, going crazy from being so cold and hungry and lonely. Maybe the whole fucking thing was a dream I was having before I died. But after a while, the—this wolf shape sort of transformed into a woman.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing!
One minute there’s this wolf, standing there, glaring at me like it wants to fucking eat me, and then the next minute there’s this gorgeous, naked woman standing in front of me. If she’d just disappeared then, I’d have chalked it all up to a dream or hallucination, but then she smiled at me. Looking me straight in the eyes, she raised both arms to me and said, “We want to help you. We want you to join us.”
It was real!
I swear to Christ, she was real!
She was standing there . . . naked . . . unbelievably gorgeous, and not even shivering while snow blew and swirled all around her.
And her
voice!
Her voice!
It’s still echoing in my memory like it’s become a part of me or something.
We want to help you. We want you to join us.
She just stood there, extending her arms out to me, and then she started to come closer.
I tried to say something but couldn’t.
I knew her for what she was.
She was
Death!
She was
hunger
.
She was
cold!
She was the
Winter Queen
, and her embrace and her kiss would mean death to me.
I dropped down onto my hands and knees and felt around until I found what I was looking for.
The flare gun.
I cocked it, making sure it was loaded, and then wheeled around quickly and shot.
The night exploded into red. The light from the flare dazzled my eyes, making it impossible for me to see anything except for the brilliant zig-zags of blue afterimages. I think I heard a loud howl of pain, but I’m really not sure. It might have been me, screaming. I was so overcome that I must have collapsed right there in the doorway. I didn’t wake up until much later. I was shivering my ass off because the fire had burned down to nothing.
I know this all sounds absolutely crazy, but in the morning, once it’s daylight, I’m going to check around in the snow for footprints . . . and blood. There must have been blood, at least from the rabbit that wolf/woman killed, right?
I really can’t talk about it anymore.
I need to rest . . . and some food. I need some goddamned food!
CLICK
“T
his is Spotter Four calling Sky Chief One. Spotter Four to Sky Chief One. Do you read me? Over.”
“Roger that, Spotter Four. I read you loud and clear. What’ve you got? Over.”
“I just saw something that might have been a flare off my left wing. It was pretty far away, and awfully low to the ground, but I’d swear it was an emergency flare. Over.”
“I didn’t see anything over this way. Make sure you mark your heading and report back to headquarters. Over.”
“Roger. I’m going to take a quick fly-by, first. Over.”
“If I was you, Spotter Four, I’d hustle my hinder back to the airport. This storm that’s coming in is supposed to be a real whopper. Worse than the last one. Over.”
“Roger that, Sky Chief One. Over and out. Spotter Four to base. This is Spotter Four calling base. Do you read me? Over.”
CLICK
E
ight-oh-five. A.M. I’m pretty sure it’s Sunday, so that makes it the twenty-first.
It’s starting again. Another storm is on its way. I thought I could feel something coming. All night, there was this . . . this feeling in the air.
I thought maybe it was just me—you know, that I was imagining things again . . . especially after what happened last night. And then finding Jodie.
She died last night.
Probably a blessing, really.
She wasn’t going to make it, anyway.
Then again, neither am I.
Not if this is a real blizzard coming. It’ll bury me and Jodie and the plane and everything. Maybe this summer or a couple of years from now, some hikers are gonna find the wreck, but by then, my bones will have been picked clean by those crows.
Or the
wolves!
Sometime around six o’clock this morning, the wind started picking up, and it started to snow. I thought about going out and trying to get enough firewood to last me through the day, but I sure as hell am not going out into those woods in the dark—not with those hungry wolves around. Maybe I scared them off for a while, but if they’re hungry enough, which I’ll bet they are, then they didn’t go very far.
They’ll be back.
I didn’t go out and check the snow for footprints or blood like I’d planned. What I saw last night seemed absolutely unreal, but I know I wasn’t imagining it. Besides, any tracks would be covered up already by the new snow. I’ll probably never know what really happened out there last night.
Maybe it’s just as well.
I can hear the wind and snow banging against the side of the plane. It sounds like it’s almost ice, rattling like we’re being sprayed by thousands of rock pellets or something.
Wait a second. Why’d I say we?
There’s no
we
anymore.
There’s just me and my dead girlfriend, and four other dead friends I’ve got stacked up outside the plane like fucking firewood. I want to stay focused, stay positive, but I don’t see how I’m going to make it more than another day or two. I’m so hungry my stomach’s a constant knot of pain. I haven’t even dared take Jodie outside yet. I’m not sure I can bring myself to touch her.
The others—sure it was hard, but I hadn’t slept with them—or made love to them. Huh! Except for my manager, Denny. I guess you could say he fucked me over plenty of times over the last few years.
That’s not funny!
But with Jodie, though . . . I can’t stop wondering if I’d be able to stop myself if I was going to—
To. . . .
Jesus, no! I can’t think about it. I’m not going to—I
couldn’t
cut her up and eat her, even if it means that I have to die out here!
Oh, yeah—sure, right now I’m so hungry it hurts, but I’m not insane.
Not yet, anyway.
But what if I’m snowed in here for a day or two before I can even dig my way out?