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…?
Coburn shivered.
Or had it been carved by someone from the inside, trying to get out?
The soil was black and still held the shapes of the objects that had been frozen to it, and ahead…were those claw marks? No. They were too far apart. And too deep. He reached in as far as he could and aligned his fingers with the gouges, then quickly retracted his hand. Close to a match. If anything, his fingers might have been a little smaller than those that had left the marks. The dirt. The dirt was scraped upward toward the opposite end of the tunnel…as though someone had curled his fingers into the dirt as he was being dragged out the tunnel from behind.
He imagined a man backing into the tunnel with all of the food he had left. Stacking the rocks in front of him so he couldn’t be seen. Waiting in the darkness. Scratching sounds from behind him. Dirt skittering down the earthen tube. The movement of shadows in front of him through the cracks between the stones. The attack comes from behind, from within the mountain itself. A scream echoes in the cellar—
Coburn backed out of the tunnel as fast as he could. He didn’t even think about restacking the stones. He just turned around, held the lighter out in front of him, and—
Stopped right where he was.
His breath caught in his chest.
All around the small entryway. Names. Names and dates. Carved into the wood. Some of them reasonably fresh. Some of them so old they were nearly indistinguishable from the faded planks. There had to be dozens of them.
John Michael Watkins, 2/5/74.
James Aaron Peters, 11-9-97.
Thaddeus Wilson Waller, December the Twelfth, the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-six.
William Clayton Rayburn, Jan 4, 1952.
The list went on and on. Coburn lost track of them when he saw the large words carved above them. Much deeper than all of the rest. As though the same hands that had added their names to the list had gone over the letters again for emphasis.
THEY COME AT NIGHT.
* * *
“Todd!” Coburn shouted as he burst into the main room and rounded the corner into the bedroom. “We have to get out of here! We’re running out of time! We can’t stay—!”
A hand closed over his mouth and he was bodily pulled into the shadows.
“Shh!” Baumann whispered into his ear. “Not a sound. You hear me? Not a sound.”
Coburn nodded and Baumann released his grip.
The fire was now dead. Only its scent remained, and even that wouldn’t last much longer with as hard as the frigid breeze was blowing straight through the window. Snow had already begun to accumulate on the ring of stones. The flakes hissed when they alighted on the charcoaled logs.
Baumann pantomimed for Coburn to get his rifle, then sighted the outside world through his scope. Coburn retrieved his Remington, aligned his aim with Baumann’s, and zoomed in on the distant forest through the storm. He could barely see the trunks of the trees with all of the snowflakes crossing his field of view. The canopy was buried in white. The detritus was hidden beneath the white. Everything was white, except for the bark on the trunks and the branches in the lee of the wind. And the shadows. Dark shadows that clung to the shrubs and cowered under the lowest branches. He was about to ask Baumann what he was supposed to be seeing when the shadows moved.
Coburn held his breath and struggled to keep his scope steady.
There it was again. Farther to the right this time. Behind the frozen skeleton of a scrub oak. Nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings.
“By my count, there are at least two more out there,” Baumann whispered. “They know we’re here.”
“I’ve got news for you. They’ve been ahead of us the whole time. They always knew that this was where we’d go.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because they’ve done this many, many times before.”
Baumann was silent for a long moment.
“What did you find back there?” he finally asked.
So Coburn told him.
* * *
“They come at night,” Baumann whispered. “I don’t get it. They’re already out there right now. And unless I completely lost track of time, the sun hasn’t set yet.”
“We both know what it means,” Coburn whispered. He bit the wrapper of a Slim Jim and tore it open with his teeth so that he didn’t have to remove his eye from the sight. He tried not to think about the side of the wrapper that had been frozen to the ground in a puddle of blood as it soaked into the dirt. Tried not to taste it. They didn’t have enough water that they could afford to waste a drop of it to clean it off. And they surely didn’t want to see the expiration date, either. “It means they’ll be coming for us soon.”
The temperature was falling by the second as the sky darkened behind the clouds, but at least they’d rekindled the fire. There wasn’t much point in trying to hide anymore. Whoever was out there knew where they were and undoubtedly already knew exactly how they would approach. After all, they’d been doing it for nearly a century, which brought to mind the question neither could answer with any kind of certainty.
“Who’s coming for us?” Baumann whispered. “Who do you think is out there?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Coburn thought about the claw marks on the board that had covered the window and on the window sill following Vigil’s abduction, the tracks in the snow where some large animal had crouched to consume the severed hand, the clumps of fur in the cellar and the pure savagery with which Shore had been killed mere feet from him. “But I think we’re dealing with a what, not a who.”
“Don’t try to tell me bears—”
“No, not bears.”
“Then what? What kind of animal could tie a hand to a nail by a tendon or make a display of Vigil’s head like that?”
“I don’t know.” Coburn took a bite of the beef stick and savored the flavor, if not the texture. “But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
* * *
The shadow of Mt. Isolation fell heavily upon the clouds as the sun abandoned them to the dusk. The blizzard intensified its efforts in response, filling the air with thick flakes the size of dimes. The wind screamed in delight and hurled them faster and faster, first one way and then the other. The accumulation swept up the side of the house and spilled over the windowsill, where it melted into a muddy puddle by the fire. Baumann knelt to the side of it, his back against the interior wall abutting the hillside, the fire to his right, his rifle directed out the window at such an angle that to see him would mean to be in his sights. He’d smeared mud on his face and his hands, and did his best to keep the snow from accumulating on his scope as it blew at him. Half a stick of jerky hung from his mouth like a cigar.