The Shuddering (32 page)

He hadn’t lost anything. They’d be together soon.

The creatures were mercifully keeping their distance—a blessing, since the group had to stop every few minutes to catch their breath, pausing every hour for an even longer break. Maybe those things had been spooked enough to search for alternative prey. Maybe it was the blood that had frozen to their faces like war paint, stained their clothes, and clumped and matted in their hair. Ryan didn’t know exactly why they were being given this opportunity to make headway, but he also couldn’t be bothered to care. Both he and Jane were exhausted. Sawyer didn’t look good, hardly able to keep his eyes open for longer than a few minutes at a time. They were losing daylight with each pause, and all Ryan could hope for was that they’d hit the highway before nightfall. If they didn’t, they’d have to make camp, and he wasn’t convinced any of them would survive the night. Their stash of food was meager, their energy was low, and despite the lack of snowfall, the wind was relentless, biting at any exposed bit of skin. The chill would only grow more bitter with the onset of darkness. The windchill alone would be enough to end them.

But after hours of trudging forward at a snail’s pace, there was no denying that they weren’t going to make it in a single day. The five miles from the driveway to the highway suddenly seemed like five hundred. They were drained, and if they pushed themselves too hard, they wouldn’t have the energy to defend themselves if they were attacked.

Ryan shot a look over his shoulder at the tree line a hundred yards away. They were there, lurking in the shadows, watching their
kill move farther and farther away as they moaned and growled within their throats; what Ryan had expected to be welcome distance made his nerves buzz with trepidation. Perhaps he had been wrong. Maybe they weren’t afraid. Perhaps they were simply waiting for the light of day to burn away before making their final move. He shoved his sleeve upward with his glove, exposing the watch that was wrapped around his wrist. It was a few minutes shy of four in the afternoon. The sun would be gone in an hour. If they were going to make camp, they had to start now.

“We should stop here,” he announced. Jane’s expression immediately shifted from pained to anxious.

“What? Why? I thought we were going to the highway.”

“We are. But we’re only about halfway.”

Jane shook her head in disbelief. “That’s impossible,” she insisted. “We’ve been out here for hours.”

“Believe it,” Ryan told her. “We’ve gone two miles, three if we’re lucky. Sunset is in an hour. If we keep going, we’ll get a quarter of a mile farther. We need to set up camp or we’ll freeze.”

Jane’s gaze flitted to Sawyer, her face twisting with dread. Ryan knew what she was thinking—they didn’t have much time. Sawyer was weak, and without moving around like they were, he would be cold. If he didn’t make it through the night, the blame would be on Ryan. But he had expected this. He knew the trek was going to be hard and, with Sawyer incapacitated, even longer than it would have been if the three of them were able-bodied. They could continue through the night, but there was no doubt in his mind they’d collapse only hours after nightfall—spent, freezing. Sawyer wouldn’t survive it. But there was a possibility he’d survive the night tucked into a snow shelter away from the wind.

“I knew this would take longer than a day,” he confessed, hoping that his admission would somehow soothe her nerves. He had kept it from her on purpose, knowing that if he had
mentioned it earlier, she would have demanded to stay in the cabin rather than fight to survive.

Jane’s expression flitted between fear and anger. But without saying anything, she silently turned away from him, unstrapped the leash supply board she had taken over from her belt loop, and grabbed the lead to Sawyer’s gurney from Ryan’s hand, beginning her indignant march away from the group. She lumbered along for a few feet, the black smoke of her torch spiraling into the gray clouds overhead, releasing a frustrated cry of exertion as she tried to pull Sawyer and Oona along. But they hardly budged. Oona whined from Sawyer’s lap as she watched Jane struggle back in the direction from which they had come.

“Jane.” Ryan sighed. “Come on, stop it.”

“I’m going back!” She continued to push through the snow, stumbling once before regaining her footing, Sawyer’s sled sliding ever so slowly behind her.

“Why?” he asked. “We’re halfway there. Go forward if you’re going to go anywhere.”

Jane stopped where she was, as though considering it. Then she whipped around and began to trek forward, deciding that the highway was a better option. But by the time she reached her brother again, she was too winded to go any farther.

“Will you please calm down?” he asked her. “We’re going to make a shelter, okay?” Ryan leaned down and swiped the supply board’s leash up in his hand, holding it out for Jane to reattach. Then he looked around, evaluating their position, took a few steps away from Sawyer and Oona, dropped to his knees, and started to dig.

Jane turned her face up to the darkening sky, shook her head after a moment, and whispered, “Goddamnit,” before dropping to her knees next to him, burying her gloves in the snow.

T
hirty minutes before sundown, they completed digging and packing their shelter in the snow. With the tarp secured over it, Ryan could only hope it would be enough to shelter them from the cold. He’d watched enough survival shows to know how to navigate down a snowy mountain, and he knew the best way to live through an avalanche, but he’d be damned if he could recall an episode that taught him how to fend off man-eating hellions in knee-deep powder.

Those things continued to prowl just beyond the tree line, their shadows seemingly more active as the daylight bled dark. It made him nervous, because in this worst-case scenario, there couldn’t be anything more disastrous than those creatures sneaking up on them after dark. The possibility of an ambush made his hair follicles tingle.

Jane sat on top of a tightly packed lump of snow she had created for herself—a lookout, of sorts. Sawyer and Oona were next to her, Sawyer not having spoken in the past few hours. Jane tried to get Sawyer to drink some Diet Coke from their inadequate stash of food. She fumbled with a cellophane pack of stale saltines, trying to tear them open with her teeth without pulling off her gloves. Eventually getting the packaging open, she fed Sawyer a cracker while he remained bundled and motionless under the quilt.

With the sky a pale purple, Ryan unloaded a good amount of gear from the wicker basket atop Jane’s board, dumping spare
pool cues and torches into their shelter before turning his attention to his sister and best friend. It was time to move Sawyer into the den.

Ryan pulled Sawyer as close as possible to the snow shelter before both he and Jane hefted him up, their shoulders beneath his arms. Sawyer tried to brave the movement without a sound, but he couldn’t help crying out when they lowered him into the hole in the hard-packed snow. Oona and Jane followed him inside a moment later.

“Stay here with him,” Ryan told her, tying the leash of the supply board around his belt loop. If they were going to make it through the night, they needed fire.

“Where are you going?” As soon as she saw him preparing for another trek, Jane instinctively crawled out of the shelter and back into the snow. It crunched beneath her. The sun, however slight, had melted it enough so that it refroze into a brittle glittering crust. Ryan motioned toward the trees as he plucked up his torch.

“Wood,” he said. “Stay in there.” He nodded at their makeshift shelter. “The more people inside, the warmer it’ll be.”

“But what about you?” she asked. “You can’t go out there alone. What if they come back?”

What if they had
learned
? The idea of it made his mouth taste acrid, his fear breeding a sharp, metallic taste. But he refused to let those kinds of thoughts dictate his movements. They were out of options, and showing weakness now would send Jane over the edge.

“I’ve fought them off before,” Ryan said, emptying most of their supplies onto the snow. He’d need room for firewood and Jane would need weapons in case she and Sawyer were the ones attacked. But Jane wasn’t satisfied with his answer. She shook her head, resolute.

“Oona will warm the place up. I’m coming with you.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Why not?” she demanded. “This is insane. It’s like splitting up in the movies. Nobody comes back alive after splitting up; you
know
that.”

“Jane.” He gave her a steady look. “I’m just going to be over there.” He pointed to the trees in the distance. He knew they were farther away than they looked, but he didn’t mention it. “You can watch me if you want to, but I need you to stay with Sawyer, okay? We can’t leave him alone. Try to get him to eat some more crackers. He needs to keep his strength up.”

Jane gave in, nodding with a frown. “Fine,” she told him. “Just be careful.”

Ryan began to slog through the snow. The closer he got to the wall of pine, the more nervous he felt. The trees they had left in their wake were the closest to their camp, but those were the trees where Ryan had seen the shadows shift. There was another thicket to the north, close enough to walk to in five or ten minutes on a warm summer afternoon, but trying for them now would eat up the last dregs of daylight.

With only a few yards left between him and the pines, he couldn’t help but think that maybe he was wrong. Maybe those things weren’t waiting for nightfall after all, but for this exact moment; for Jane and Ryan to split up, for one of them to come close enough to the forest to be pulled into the branches. He swallowed against the thudding in his throat, forcing himself to continue forward with a torch held over his head, the ax handle sticking out of his backpack, the wicker basket skidding across the top of the snow behind him. Finally reaching a tree on the outermost rim of the woods, he slid his backpack from his shoulders and grabbed the hatchet. But there was no way he could chop at the tree one-handed. Daylight was dwindling. He had
to be quick. Chewing on his bottom lip, he scanned the trunks and branches ahead of him, waiting for one of those creatures to launch itself at him before he could think to defend himself.

It was deathly silent.

He didn’t hear any throaty growls or mournful moans.

Only the wail of the wind.

Slowly leaning down, he stabbed his torch into the snow a few feet away from where he stood, hoping like hell that he’d have enough time to retrieve it if he needed to.

The ax in both hands now, he took a swing at the low-hanging branch of a sickly looking tree. He didn’t know whether live wood would burn, so he went for the conifer that looked the least healthy, hoping that the inside of its branches would be dry enough to catch a spark. The tree shuddered beneath the hit, and snow fell to the ground not just from that limb, but from the branches overhead as well. He swung again. After two more attempts, the bough released its grip on the trunk and fell to the ground. As he pulled it to the basket, it left a delicate brushstroke across the snow.

He went for a bigger branch next. There were smaller ones he could have worked on first, but he had to get back to Sawyer and Jane. Deep indigo was bleeding into the lavender sky. The shifting color of the clouds was making Ryan nervous. The sun was setting faster than he had anticipated. The second branch came down after five solid swings, then joined its brother on the board. Tackling the third branch—this one even larger than the second—he told himself this would be the last. As soon as he cut it down, he would turn tail and book it back to the shelter. The tree shuddered as he tried to lop the bough loose, shaking snow onto the ground from a good eight feet up. It began to sag beneath its own weight, the spot where the ax blade struck exposing virgin wood. His final swing brought a thud of snowfall onto his head. He stumbled backward as ice flakes bit into
the back of his neck, swiping at the collar of his jacket, trying to dust away as much of it as he could before it melted down his back. And then he grabbed the end of the large branch he’d just conquered, turned to pull it toward the supply board, only to stop short.

The snow hadn’t just gotten the back of his neck.

It had gotten his torch as well.

Jane tried to feed Sawyer another cracker, but he shook his head faintly and ducked farther beneath his blanket. “I just want to sleep,” he croaked dryly. Eventually, she let him rest, turning her back to him to peek her head out from beneath the tarp and watch her brother from a distance.

The white landscape had settled into a cold, pale blue—the only spots of brightness the torch that burned next to her, and the torch that burned three hundred feet away. She coiled her arms around herself and listened to the whap of metal against wood, each strike echoing around them like the gunshots she’d heard that very morning. She never understood why snow seemed to make the world go silent. It was haunting, the way all sound seemed to be erased from the world.

Jane imagined Lauren sitting next to her right then, assuring her that things were going to be all right, that they would be
more
than all right, because after they made it out of this they’d get millions for their story. They’d be on TV. They’d write a book. And then, of course, there would be a movie. Both she and Jane would attend the premiere wearing gowns worth more than Lauren’s car while mingling with the likes of Brad Pitt and George Clooney—Lauren’s two favorite actors. “George Clooney,” she had once said. “Now there’s a man who’s money I wouldn’t mind spending.” Jane smiled to herself as Lauren planned her phantom future inside her head. Lauren always had a way of looking at the positive side of things, always had a way
of reaching out and grabbing life by the horns. She had been full of life and passion; funny and gorgeous and smart, so much that she had caught Ryan’s attention. His laughter had been a little freer around her, his smile a little more soulful.