Snowbound - Blake Crouch [52]
Something ripped a piece out of his leg and he screamed—more out of fear than pain, too charged with adrenaline to feel a thing—kept spinning around in the merciless dark, his hands outstretched, getting shredded as he fended off bites.
The sky lighted up, the wolves right there, five sets of bared teeth and eyes mad with the ravenous rage of the hunt, crouched down, on the verge of lunging.
Will spotted a stand of spruce trees at the mouth of the stream, thought, You get to those trees and you climb them. He pushed on through the dark as thunder echoed across the lake, struggling against the mounting pain in his legs.
Electricity raked the sky. He was just five yards from the trees, saw that the branches were low, thought, I can climb that.
The Lodge That Doesn’t Exist
FORTY-ONE
Devlin crawled out of her sleeping bag and unzipped the tent, caught a draft of bitter, choking cold that ran down into her lungs like battery acid. The moon shone upon the meadow. The snow had let up. She didn’t know how long she’d hidden in her sleeping bag—an hour, perhaps two—and though, up until this moment, she’d done exactly what her father had said, not leaving the tent, she still felt like a coward.
It had been some time since she’d heard the gunshots, and the Wolverine Hills stood silent now. She laced her boots and zipped up her oversize parka, dug the pair of gloves and hat out of her father’s backpack. In Kalyn’s, she found the .357. She’d never held a gun in her life, but she picked it up and put it in her pocket.
The snow came halfway to her knees, having partially buried the tracks around the tent. She followed them down through the meadow to the point where they split, one set veering into the woods, the other crossing the meadow, back toward the tent, missing it by less than ten feet.
She was seized with a sudden coughing fit, her eyes watering as her lungs strained against the cold. When it passed, she turned and followed the tracks that went by the tent, her legs sore from yesterday’s hike, her lungs raw, her body reeling with every breath.
She pushed on through woods, down small hills and up them again, through glades of drifted snow, thinking the tracks seemed strange. They didn’t go in any one direction, but wound erratically through the spruce, crisscrossing over themselves, and, at one point, even circling the same tree three times.
Her legs were killing her when she came out of the trees at last. She stopped to let her racing heart slow down. A long lake stretched out below her, and the way the moonlight fell upon it, the surface resembled black ice, though it had yet to freeze. Her eyes followed the course of what she hoped were her father’s tracks. They beelined downslope toward the lake’s end, and she smiled, spotted movement by the water, just a few hundred yards away.
Dad. She almost shouted the word as she started down the slope.
Thirty yards out from the trees, she stopped. From the woods, she had seen only movement by the lake. On closer inspection, she saw with more clarity what she was heading toward, and it didn’t appear to be her father. It looked like several people, children perhaps, on their hands and knees, crawling around in the snow in some sort of game. In the windless silence, she could hear them, but they weren’t speaking any language she understood. They were growling and snarling, fighting over something. Wolves. Why do Dad’s tracks go down there?
She turned around, and quietly, carefully started back up the slope.
Halfway to the woods, she felt it coming—an insuppressible itch in her lungs, growing exponentially with every passing second. Hold it, Devi. You have to hold it. The cough jumped out of her, then another, a series of violent spasms that shook her body and burned her throat.
When the coughing spell had passed, she looked downslope, saw the wolves already coming—five of them bounding toward her through the snow.
She ran for the woods, only fifteen yards away, but her legs felt leaden and stiff, barely capable of pushing her up the