Thirteen
They ran blindly through the woods, their feet slipping on rocks and leaves buried beneath the snow. Despite each of them being propelled forward on the wings of their own individual terror, they managed to stay together in the crushing darkness.
“Is he following us?” Marcus shouted from up ahead. He was leading them, the flashlight jerking in his hand, its beam a crazy dance beyond any hope of interpretation.
Ian looked behind but only saw the open mouth of night—trees for teeth, snow its tongue. “Keep going!” he cried.
Ashley went down in front of him, and he tripped over her. They both tumbled into a patch of prickly underbrush.
The laser beam of light swung back toward them, revealing their desperate escape from the clutches of dead vines and rotted wood.
“Come on!” Heather screamed, reaching out and helping pull her sister to her feet.
Ian was too cold to tell if he’d been hurt, but he knew that someone was going to get seriously injured if they kept this up. “Let’s slow it up a bit,” he said, back on his feet. “We won’t be going anywhere if one of us breaks something.”
Marcus slowed, his light becoming less sporadic.
Ian had the most experience in the great outdoors, and he preferred to be the one holding the flashlight and leading the way, afraid that Marcus might lead them off a ledge or onto a not-so-frozen lake. But there was something about making the only black guy in the group take up the rear that just wasn’t right. Too many movies.
Or maybe not
, he thought. After all, he realized, Marcus had been the only one to receive an actual threat on his cell phone. In any case, he imagined that their frozen bodies would be found days from now, once the storm cleared and troopers began searching the woods for the passengers of the flipped rental.
Marcus let out a holler, and the light suddenly swung upward, highlighting the snowflakes dancing through the branches above them.
“Are you okay?” Heather asked him. Her voice was heavy and slow, barely making it past her chattering teeth. It wouldn’t be long before every word was its own sentence and every movement an act of concentration.
“I’m fine,” Marcus answered back.
“We have to try starting a fire,” Ian said.
Ashley started to protest.
“We’re gonna freeze if we don’t.” He held his hand out to her, gesturing for the paper contents from the glove compartment.
But what she handed over was just a ball of soggy trash.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Guess it got wet.”
Marcus started patting his pockets. “Crap.”
“What?”
“Dropped my phone.”
“You still have the map?” Ian wanted to know.
“Sorry,” he muttered gravely.
Ian sighed, crossed his arms, and squeezed himself as tightly as possible. “Maybe we should go back to the road…”
“Are you crazy, man?”
“For all we know that guy was about to offer us a ride.” He tested the words out on his tongue but knew better.
Ashley snorted in disbelief. “To where?”
He fumbled with his cell phone. “Maybe there’s something nearby.”
Heather turned on her phone that she’d rescued from the ground before running off into the woods. She didn’t know if she’d broken it by stomping on it or not. It worked. The battery was almost dead, but for now, it worked.
Ashley stared into the glow of her own smartphone. “Maybe we can find a Zippo app or something.”
Ian swore. “Says it can’t acquire my coordinates at this time.”
“I got it,” Heather said. “Assuming we can trust it.”
They all huddled together, looking over her shoulder. Her hands were shaking so much that it might have been comical under different circumstances.
“Why don’t we find a place to set it down,” Marcus offered, shining the flashlight around them.
“There,” she said, pointing. “There’s a flat rock over there.”
Heather placed the phone down on it, finally stopping the image from moving.
She put her fingers on the target indicating their current location and slowly began spreading her fingers, zooming in tighter on their position. The screen showed nothing but the road they’d run from and forest all around them.
“Zoom back out a little,” Ashley said.
She brought finger and thumb closer.
“There.” Ashley pointed to a spot near the edge of the phone. “Zoom in there. What is that?”
Heather was using the satellite image of the map, an actual overhead image of their location that looked to have been taken in some past October. “Looks like a parking lot,” she said. She zoomed in closer.
“That’s a road,” Ashley commented. “And a building.”
“Maybe just a pavilion,” Marcus cautioned. The unlabeled road stretched away from whatever it was, heading off east and deeper into the forest.
“That road has to go somewhere.” Ian blew a long, warm breath into his hands. “Let’s go.”
They started to move again, and before long, the ceiling of branches and pine needles began to spread apart, granting the falling snow a clear path to the ground. They had to take bigger strides now, the snow reaching their shins.
“How can this possibly be happening?” Marcus mumbled to himself. He kept turning around and shining the flashlight behind them, making sure the man in black wasn’t standing there watching them.
“What?” Ian shouted over the wind. “No preacher quotes?”
Marcus didn’t respond. He was too cold to respond.
“My…f-f-face…feels…f-f-frozen,” Heather stuttered.
“Mine…t-t-t-too…” Ashley asked, “How…m-m-much…further?”
Heather looked at the phone, through its cracked face, but she had to stop and hold it with two hands in order to keep it from shaking. “H-h-half…way…th-there.”
Ian knew that if what awaited them was merely an empty parking lot beside an open pavilion, they could be done for. They needed shelter and warmth. They could follow the path to wherever it led, which would be a lot safer than trying to navigate straight through the woods, but if it didn’t lead to something close by, they’d be in bad shape come morning.
“How are…your feet?” he asked Heather.
“I…think they’re…still…th-th-there. Can’t…feel th-them at all.”
He was worried about frostbite, too. There was no way they were all getting out of this without their fair share of it.
Marcus brought them to a wall of thick underbrush they couldn’t get through, and they had to walk around it until finding an opening.
“You sh-should see where the-the-the road leads,” Marcus called back to Heather. But the wind snatched most of his words from the air, and he had to try again, louder.
“When we get to the-the-the b-b-b-uilding,” Ian answered for her. “Let’s keep m-m-moving.” He frowned. This was bad. Earlier, back in the Christmas-carol warmth of their blessed Ford, when Heather expressed displeasure toward thoughts of breaking down and being stranded out here, Ian had just laughed it off. Yeah, that would suck,
ha-ha
. What were the chances? And what the hell were the chances that that driver was able to travel these roads at nearly seventy miles per hour? And then to spot them on the side of the road while passing? Impossible.
“Kinda w-w-weird,” Marcus shouted, loud enough to be heard by everyone. “Heather’s phone sends us n-north, we hit a m-m-moose, then I get a text that says ‘I’m coming f-f-for you’ and ‘Almost th-there.’ And then when that guy shows up, a m-m-message says, ‘I am h-here.’”
“It’s the phones,” Heather whispered again.
“Th-that doesn’t make sense,” Ashley argued. And then she walked into a tree. “Motherf-f-f—”
“You okay?” Marcus swung the flashlight around and lit her up. She was bent over, holding a hand to her head.
“Yeah…”
“What do you think the guy m-meant when he said, ‘Give it to us’?” Ian’s joints were feeling more and more corroded with each miserable step.
“He m-must think we’re someone else,” Heather offered.
Ian didn’t buy it. “If the text messages, somehow, are connected with him…then th-there’s no way he has the wrong people.”
They walked on, spreading branches, climbing rocks, and falling over each other while letting Ian’s words permeate their breached sense of reality.
If
the messages were related to that dark man driving a ’71 Camaro through the Adirondacks at seventy miles per hour in a blizzard…then he would know the contents of the messages, wouldn’t he? Which meant that he knew secrets about them that not even their closest friends and family members knew. How was
that
possible?
“The t-t-text said ‘We.’” Marcus was walking slower now. “S-so whatever’s goin’ on involves more…than…just one…p-p-person.”
While Ian told himself he didn’t believe in God anymore, he’d never stopped to consider whether or not he still believed in Satan, or a spiritual realm at all, for that matter—demons, ghosts, spirits… Did his denying the existence of God also deny him the metaphysical? He didn’t know. All he knew was that his skin was covered with gooseflesh, and not just because he was freezing. All the hair on the back of his neck was standing on end, antennas picking up signals of foreboding loud and clear—signals his rational mind kept trying to prove weren’t real.
But the Camaro was real, as had been the man who stepped out of it.
“Let’s j-j-just keep walking,” he shouted through the blinding snow. His ears were freezing! “No more t-t-talking.” He couldn’t stop stealing glances behind him, still expecting to see the driver in the big hat and sunglasses walking after them, unimpeded by the darkness or the density of the forest.
Ten minutes later, and with not one more step left in them, the flashlight’s beam swept over a clearing.
“Th-th-th-th…” Heather’s teeth were clattering so loudly that she had to summon the will to work her way through it. “This…is…it.”
Marcus swung the beam around the corners of the lot, tracing its edge, looking for the building they all needed to be there.
“Where is it, dammit?” Ian forced his wooden legs into the untouched blanket of snow as Marcus continued searching the perimeter.
“G-g-give…m-m-me…flash…light,” Ashley insisted, reaching for it.
Marcus handed it over.
“What’d you see?” he asked.
She pointed the beam toward the corner of the clearing diagonal to them.
Ian squinted. There was something there. He started walking, zombie-like, through a foot of snow. After covering half of the small lot, he could finally make out what it was.
A black, mud-stained, 2009 Range Rover Sport.
The sight of the vehicle infused energy into his stiffened joints, and he began to walk faster. He could hear the others following after him. Marcus was trying to keep the light steady, and every time his hand flinched, the vehicle disappeared back into nothingness. Each time, Ian expected the car to be gone when Marcus finally got the light back to it. But it stayed put. They weren’t imagining things.
They congregated around the vehicle. There was a coating of snow on the roof, but hardly any on the hood. That seemed odd.
Just as Ian reached for the handle, the Rover’s interior light went on.
Fourteen
The wind comes howling down the road, an invisible force storming through a backdoor pried open from the other side of reality. The gust of alien energy repeatedly snaps at his long coat with a violent
crack
sound and tries its hardest to carry his hat away. He stands completely unconscious to all of this. To the wind, the snow, the cold. He is only aware of one thing.
The ring.
It’s here. Right in front of him. In the pocket of the girl standing on the side of the road. How he knows this isn’t really a concern to him. Most of what he knows he has learned not to question, only to obey.
They stand there staring at him, a sliver of pathetic hope in their eyes as if he’s here to rescue them from their predicament. Oh, there’s fear and uncertainty there as well, perhaps even terror, but he can detect the stinking smell of hope, that
disease
, clinging to them like rot. It makes him sick. Angers him. He wants to fly at them, to disembowel them…hang them from the trees by their own insides.
But he doesn’t move. He can’t.
The ring.
Being this close to it again short-circuits his mental aptitude for appropriate reaction—namely the violent death of the four people and his confiscating the ring…
his
ring.
No other person alive can boast of the relationship he has with the ancient object. No one else can claim such a fusion with its power. If there is another out there with such a link, then surely the Brotherhood would have sent
that
person after it instead. But there is no other, and there will never be another. It is he who is the Crest of Dragons. Solomon may have been made the sport of demons by the ring, but he
is
a demon. And he revels in that knowledge.
“Hello?” one of them asks him.
He ignores the little maggot, still slightly confused as to why he isn’t busy tearing throats out. Is the ring’s presence really that debilitating? Like being stunned by a woman’s beauty or some other speechless encounter with something either too wonderful to grasp or too horrid to comprehend? Not that he’s ever had an experience with beauty. At least none that he can recall. There was never any beauty in his life.
“We hit a moose back a ways…”
Oh, but he wants to walk around the front of his chariot like the renegade god he is, wants to reach out and lift the four worms off the ground and squeeze their bodies until their eyeballs pop from their skulls. He wants to debase their carcasses as a sacrifice to hell. He wants to slip the ring back on his finger and become once more “he who will destroy the world.”
But he doesn’t. He can’t. Instead, he stands there staring at them through his sunglasses, the whore blinding him with her flashlight. He has a mind to shine the flashlight somewhere else, to make its light exit the two windows of her rotting soul.
The black man looks down at his phone, shows it to the rest of them.