Call the dark a thriller, p.18
Call the Dark: A Thriller, page 18
Luna . . .
It wasn’t much interested in him at all.
It seemed drawn by the girl . . . drawn to her . . . and even as it choked him out and tried to bash his head open on the exposed porch planks, its animal impulse to get to her gave Walton the opening he needed to fight it off.
He wasn’t weaponless, still had the Jackal Pup he’d almost drawn on Agent Graham, and he was able to work the small blade loose from its horizontal sheath and get a few good jabs in on the thing, low to the rib cage. He was seeking its heart, and he felt the sharp toothlike blade go in and out, in and out, deep enough to score off bone. The thing howled in his face and kicked him free and let go.
Then it was gone inside . . . inside his cabin . . . his home.
He would’ve given it chase, would’ve chased it to hell and back for the trespass, but rifle rounds were picking their way toward him, chewing up the porch, shattering the windows he’d put in years before by hand. The fusillade kept him low, left him belly-crawling off his own damn porch like a worthless snake, slithering for cover. He wanted to get to Donnie but couldn’t crawl far or fast enough, not exposed like that, not in the cold and snow and not with bullets raining down.
He shouldn’t have kicked the agent’s gun away; that was so stupid. The kind of stupidity that gets you killed. He was about to scramble on all fours into the woods, and that’s when the girl started screaming.
A few seconds after that was when he saw Kellan.
His boy, feathered in twilight itself, waving at him. Guiding him forward, silently showing him the way. He was a shadow in shadow, looking just like he did the last day Walton ever saw him alive, not a day older, and every bit as beautiful as Walton remembered.
Oh, Kell, I hear birds coming to carry me away . . .
And then all the girl’s screaming and the gunfire stopped, and all that was left was Walton’s labored, desperate breathing.
His sobbing.
He doesn’t tell Austin or Maggie about seeing his dead son, doesn’t tell them how his boy may or may not have ushered him to safety.
But he does tell them about the thing that attacked him.
“I thought I saw you fighting with one of Graham’s men, but I didn’t see anything like that, nothing like what you just described,” Austin says, looking to Maggie for support, even if a flicker in his eye suggests he saw something. “You?”
Maggie shakes her head but seems even less sure. “It was crazy. I’m not sure I can tell you what I saw or didn’t see.”
“I’m not looking for you to agree with me,” he says. “I’m just saying what happened. And unlike those other men, I’m not so sure it was even there for you, Maggie. This was . . . something different.” He can’t help but look to the girl, and the others follow his gaze. “I hoped I’d put it down for good, but it’s been on me since I got away. Slow, steady, but there.”
“And you brought it here?” Austin asks. “How do you even know?”
Walton glares. “You may be a war hero, but I’m a hunter. I know how to track something, and I sure in the hell know when something’s tracking me.” Walton touches the bruises and rake marks on his neck, makes sure both Austin and Maggie see them good and clear. “It’s out there. And I figured if it was stalking me, it would just as soon find the likes of you two, if either of you had survived that Alamo down below.”
“Thanks,” Austin says. “I can take care of myself.”
“You’re welcome,” Walton shoots back. “Then I can just—”
“Stop, please,” Maggie interrupts. “It’s fine, you did what you could, what you had to, like we all did. But we’re here now. Together. Safety now in numbers, right?”
It’s a strange admission for a woman who only hours earlier was desperate and willing to light out on her own.
Austin raises a long gun he must’ve grabbed off one of Graham’s men, says, “I’d feel a lot safer with a couple more of these and another two hundred rounds of ammo.”
On that, Walton doesn’t disagree, even though they’ll never be able to shoot their way off Black Mountain, and that’s assuming the mountain doesn’t take them first. He’s wounded and the other two are shivering. Before long, as night falls, none of them will be thinking clearly.
“Here’s the deal,” he says. “Temperatures are dropping fast, even another two or three degrees and our brains are gonna be nothing but static. This isn’t even a full-on blizzard yet, but the storm we already got spitting down is going to both slow us down and snow-blind us. Our eyelids are gonna freeze shut, and we’re like to freeze to death if we don’t shelter, and soon. But this squall can help us too . . . if we’re smart. If we keep moving, use as much daylight as we can to put some distance between us and that FBI agent and his men, and then bed down for the night.” Walton eyes Maggie’s pack. “You still got your gear in there?”
Maggie nods. “Everything you gave me as well.”
“Good.” He keeps his eyes on Maggie. “That Graham character will need to call in the cavalry now if he’s serious about seeing this through, although I reckon he’s already got some help close by. Still, it’ll take him time to rally it all, and if we can steal ourselves some more, keep up our head start, let the storm slow him down, no one should be able to catch us here. No one knows this place as well as I do, ’cept Kell.” Maggie raises an eyebrow, questions, but he ignores her. He turns to address them both. “Not gonna lie, though, we’re up against it. I’m busted up, you”—he looks to Austin’s covered leg, doesn’t want to make an issue of it but has got to acknowledge it all the same—“ain’t gonna win any footraces, and right now, that young girl is nothing but deadweight. We don’t want to shoot it out with these people, we can’t, but I can get us off this mountain. I will. But it’s gonna be painful near every step of the way, and you’re gonna have to do about every damn thing I say, the second I say it. No lip, no questions.”
Austin glares but finally shrugs. “I’ll do my best to keep my lip zipped.” And if Austin is being a smart-ass, Walton is fine with that, long as he does what he’s told.
“Leave me,” Maggie suggests. “Take Luna and go. They’re only after me.”
But Austin isn’t done yet either. “What about this man out there tracking you . . . now tracking us? What are we going to do about that? Are you both sure no one else survived that crash? Are you willing to bet our lives on it?”
Maggie looks to Walton. “You saw that scene.”
“I didn’t see anything alive,” he replies, “not so much as a single body . . .”
At that, Maggie starts. “Wait, you didn’t see that burned guy? Facedown, like he was clawing at the dirt?” Maggie’s visibly upset by the memory, and although he knows she said clawing, it just as easily could’ve been crawling. “He was right there where I found Luna.” She laughs, almost crazy. “He was still wearing a watch, for Christ’s sake. He was definitely dead, though. Burning. But he was there.”
That thing that attacked him—
Even in the frigid, snowy gloom, something bright shone on its left wrist . . . a manacle or a chain or cuffs . . . the same left arm that swung at him, that knocked him down . . .
He doesn’t know which is crazier: that someone else somehow survived that crash and then attacked him on his porch, or that a dead man did.
A White Thing, one of the mountain’s ghosts or monsters.
But before he can answer, before he even knows what to answer, the girl speaks up—
“It was him.”
She says it again, her tongue still thick from whatever was used to knock her out.
“It was him.”
46
He lost her again and suffered mightily doing so.
He’d wanted to use the chaos of the shooting to make his move but wasted too much time on that old man, who proved more formidable than he first appeared, although the mountain warned him.
The wounds the man gave him would kill most, but not him, not anymore.
He crashed through the cabin, but before he could find her the cabin itself exploded in white-hot light that sucked all the air from his lungs and a crush of brutal, unforgiving noise and then she started screaming, too, releasing again all the furious birds in his head.
They beat their wings and scrabbled and clawed and cawed, and he wanted to tear his eyes out. Not even the mountain could shield him that close from her fury.
The agony and his injuries drove him back into the woods, where he waited to die, but when he didn’t, when he picked up the old man’s trail moving west from the cabin . . . moving up . . . he started after him.
He lopes now through a cold veil.
The snow curls around him, hiding him. A deep, lost part of him remembers a time when he was ten or eleven and his family, now all dead, visited a cold place like this, sitting in that old car and staring out a glass window too glacial to touch, watching snow fall on tall trees in the dark.
Streetlights and flurries glistening and twirling in their light, like moths or fleeting jewels or flecks of windblown glass.
He no longer recalls the name of his mother or his father or what became of them, other than that they are long dead. It’s possible he had a sister once, too, because a young girl’s face beckons at the edge of these memories, but every time he tries to summon it, it’s her face that appears.
She’s gone quiet and still in the aftermath of the cabin. Unconscious, drugged, but very much alive. Her thoughts flutter brightly out there for him to follow.
Just like—
Moths or fleeting jewels or flecks of windblown glass . . .
He scoops up the frigid snow, licks at it, uses it to stanch his wounds.
And continues to climb.
47
Ekker sits in the sheriff’s cold truck and takes stock of his assets.
Bisek is next to him in the front passenger seat—Ekker was still wary about putting the man at his back, given what happened to Tancredi—but appears finally to be shaking off whatever afflicted him.
Unfortunately, he’s not particularly helpful either. He can’t fill in the blanks on what happened at the cabin. Or how—exactly—Rade got away. He does recall a young girl with her, though, a teen or close to it, but all he can say about her is she whispered to him, called out his name, and the world turned upside down. He mentions someone named Uncle Stepan, and his eyes go dark.
Ekker doesn’t know what any of this means, but given what he experienced, too, he’s unwilling to dismiss it out of hand. He can’t dismiss anything; he’s prepared to use everything at his disposal, and that includes Bisek, no matter how broken he still might be.
In World War II, the Nazis distributed Pervitin, the Japanese Philopon, and the Allies Benzedrine, all methamphetamine-based stimulants to get soldiers back into the fight. In Vietnam, it was dextroamphetamine, so-called pep pills, and it left a whole generation of veterans with raging substance abuse problems. The designer pharmaceutical cocktail Ekker hits Bisek with is more elegant than any of those, but just as addictive, twice as powerful. It still has numerous potentially unpleasant side effects, too, including burning away Bisek’s brain fog as well as most of his short-term memory.
He’s conscious, stable, and very angry. And that’s good enough for now.
Hindsight is a perfect science, and in hindsight, Ekker should have called up a bigger team.
Bisek. Tancredi. Porter. Mosely.
Local extraction and delivery. Hands-on support.
Feiser.
Logistics and tech and signal intelligence.
But Ekker came to the same conclusion that Theroux did: Pullens was small enough that any significant outside presence would draw too much unwanted attention, both from Rade herself (if she was still even bedded down in the town) and any local law enforcement (if things got loud trying to find her), so better to follow in Rade’s footsteps as quiet as possible until the last-possible moment, aiming for low-profile infiltration and exfil. Ekker, however, decided to extrapolate off Theroux’s failure and make Pullens’s size and remoteness an exploitable asset, turning Pullens’s small, rural, and woefully unprepared sheriff’s office into an unwitting force multiplier for his own small team via the Agent Graham persona. A good plan almost necessitated by Brooking’s insistence on Ekker bringing Rade in alive.
That stipulation is what derailed Theroux’s efforts as well. In the end, his attempt to go in too small, too soft, is exactly what got him killed. The delicate balance of putting hands on the woman without injuring her too badly, if at all. The unnatural hesitation you force on a killer when you order that killer not to draw blood.
None of that matters, though, if Rade isn’t the primary target anymore, and that’s why he’s decided to forgo alerting Brooking. He doesn’t want Brooking getting antsy, doesn’t want him interfering. That’s also why Ekker’s decided not to call in further external reinforcements, even if he easily could. Between the storm lurking overhead and the nonexistent cellular service around the mountain, he’s limited to Feiser’s mobile network array and their satellite comms, not to mention the time it’d take for another prepped team to get on the ground here.
After what he’s experienced at the cabin, the disappearance of that black angel in his eye, Ekker doesn’t care what happens to Mia Rade anymore. She’ll still be Brooking’s problem if she survives the next twenty-four hours, which Ekker is planning she won’t.
She’s merely a means to an end now, a vector for his new target.
The girl.
The papers the dead deputy brought start a story without an ending.
There was a plane crash, somewhere likely close to here, but the plane had nothing to do with Rade at all. The girl was on the plane, and somehow survived its descent. And either Rade or Landry found her, and no doubt found themselves just as curious about her as Ekker is now, prompting Landry to reach out to Deputy Kornblue.
It’s telling that Landry went to his prior chief deputy rather than Sheriff Austin. Assuming both survived—and Ekker’s going to assume so—it speaks to an interesting dynamic between the two.
There’s not much left of Kornblue’s work and there wasn’t much to begin with, most of it windblown down the mountain or bullet riddled. But between the eTrace queries and what look to be a (real) FBI report and at least one news article, a handful of those words or phrases catch Ekker’s eye—
Conrad Stoll, a.k.a. Colm Roach. Leo Stier. Tesseract.
It’s not actionable intel, nothing he can use yet, but it’s a start.
Right now, the girl, Rade, Landry, and Austin are all somewhere on the mountain above him, cold and exhausted and probably wounded. Either together or separate. Landry knows the lay of the land, and Austin might still prove dangerous if he gets his combat senses dialed back in and his hands on a gun. The black, silent redactions in Austin’s military record speak volumes, as do Porter’s and Mosley’s fresh corpses.
Rade is the unknown variable. She’s proven resourceful time and again. The last two years have hardened her, and Ekker appreciates that, even admires it. That’s what drew him into this before. Her eyes. He knows her complicated history, the things she’s done and what she’s capable of, and not everything FBI agent Graham told Sheriff Austin about her was a lie.
How much is she willing to personally risk?
Another telling dynamic, like the tension between Austin and Landry. If the plane wasn’t for Rade, then why was she up here at all? What was she doing?
Why here?
He circles back to the question that brought him and Austin up here to begin with—
Where was she going?
Headlights bloom wearily in the window behind Bisek’s head, shining on Ekker’s face.
It’s Feiser, and it’s time to start hunting again.
48
As Walton roots through Maggie’s pack, taking stock of her gear and getting both her and the girl ready to set out again, Marcus keeps watch from fifteen yards away, tucked in beneath the overhanging branches of a canted pine.
The tree’s so low and twisted it’s about to fall over on him, but it keeps the wind and lightly blowing snow out of his face and affords him mostly unobstructed views of two cardinal directions on their position.
White snow. Gray gravestones. Black trees.
Sky the color of granite, of unwashed stone.
The stolen long gun is heavy in his hands. His hands are cold, and they’re going to get a hell of a lot colder. He and Walton aren’t really dressed for an extended winter hike, nor is the girl, done up in a mishmash of castoffs from Maggie and from Walton’s dead son.
Every few minutes Marcus takes his eyes off the storm and watches her, trying to make sense of her relationship to the other two. When she came to and said, It was him, both Walton and Maggie knew exactly who the girl was referring to, even if they couldn’t agree on what it meant.
Another plane crash survivor, a man named Roach or . . . something else.
Donnie used to say that Walton was as well versed in West Virginia’s unique lore as anyone in the state. Not just the “real” history, but all those old campfire ghost stories, too, like those in Ms. Torri’s bedside book back at the inn. As evidenced by this backwoods cemetery spread out around Marcus, all these cracked markers and stones and the winged marble angel taking flight, the old lawman’s family has been here a long, long time. Marcus has no doubt such stories were passed down again and again.
Walton’s own son vanished up here, and more than once. Donnie suggested that whenever Walton got into a bottle, he’d hint that he was haunted by more than just Kellan’s untimely disappearance and the mystery around it. Marcus isn’t sure what’s worse: armed federal agents or mercenaries hunting them or being stalked by a West Virginia ghost story.
