Call the dark a thriller, p.19
Call the Dark: A Thriller, page 19
His own experience last night—
It rumbled out of the darkness, broke free of the trees, lunged across the road in a hoary flash . . . smoky gray and white, the color of ashen shadows, of soot and dried blood and old bone. A frantic origami of impossible arms and legs . . .
But he didn’t hit a myth or ghost. Whatever it was left a dent in his truck, blood on the metal. He touched it, felt it.
Despite the haunted trappings of these woods, this isn’t a folktale, a fairy story. It could have been this man, this Roach, another crash survivor. But what are the odds, he asks himself, the luck of surviving a plane crash, only to be run over by a truck?
If any man somehow survived both things and then crawled through the woods to attack Walton in the middle of that firefight—still a big if that Marcus isn’t ready to accept, no more than he’s willing to accept that the girl gave them all a case of PTSD, like a virus—then that’s a man Marcus doesn’t want to face. Might not even be right to call it a man anymore.
Although he can’t begin to guess what might motivate such a man, he agrees with Walton that his appearance has more to do with the young girl with the weird eyes and burned hair than Mia Rade. If he’s still out here on this mountain stalking them, it’s because she’s here too. This whole mess might have started with the Rade woman, but it’ll end with that girl.
Those eyes are something . . .
Hard to shake, harder to forget.
He and Deidre never seriously considered kids. She had a rough upbringing in Norfolk that didn’t plant the desire, and after Marcus saw some of the shittiest sides of a world that didn’t seem fit to bring a child into, nothing he’d seen after had much changed his mind. It was the one thing they could always agree on, even when they couldn’t agree on much else.
He doesn’t recall if the Mia Rade from Graham’s reports had children, but it’s hard to imagine she would have up and left them, not if danger was close on her heels, and Graham was telling the truth. This Maggie didn’t leave the girl behind at the cabin, either, and she had every chance.
But Marcus assumes now that nearly everything Graham told him was a lie, anyway, including the man’s name. Marcus was duped, played for a fool, and Donnie Kornblue is dead as a result. The way things are going they’re likely all to be dead before night falls.
The cold holds him and he scans the white snow, the gray gravestones, the black trees.
He’s not particularly afraid of dying.
But just let me see that sonofabitch one more time, he thinks. Just give me one chance to return the favor.
49
Maggie shrugs when Landry finds the ten-inch-long, wicked-looking serrated knife in her pack.
He holds up the sheathed blade, asks, “A Tom Brown Tracker T3?”
“Yeah, I guess. I found it used at a pawn shop,” she answers. “I bought a couple different ones.”
“I reckon,” he says, not commenting on the one she left buried in a man back in Pullens. “My boy swore by ’em. He had several too.” He tosses the Tracker to her. “Put it on. Won’t do you any good otherwise.”
He continues cataloging her pack: UCO Stormproof Sweetfire Strikeable Fire Starters, Titan Stormproof Match Kit, HART day hike safety kit, Black Diamond headlamp, NEMO Dragonfly tent and Disco sleeping bag. Spare clothes and socks. An extra SureFire and batteries. His MyFAK emergency kit and her dad’s compass and sextant and her trail map with her handwritten marks.
Five thousand dollars in tens, and twenties, tightly heat sealed. Another thousand in smaller denominations and $100 bills, all in a ziplock baggie.
Two sets of car keys, the first still sporting the ring and tag from that used car lot in New Jersey, the second a simple key fob, blurry and indistinct in its own heat-sealed pouch.
She can recite everything and doesn’t protest or resist as Landry goes through it all. They were all a means to an end anyway, and if any of it can keep even one of them alive for another day, another hour, that’s all that matters now.
“How’s she doing?” Landry asks her, nodding at Luna. The girl’s stayed conscious, but she’s slipped into one of her waking catatonic states again. Like shock, but not. Breathing steady, eyes open, staring, but it’s anybody’s guess what she’s seeing.
Maggie knows if Luna survives this, it’ll be a long time—maybe never—for her to unsee what’s happened here.
Landry looks up the mountain, lost in thought. It’s getting tough to talk and hear over the wind; the snow’s now hardened, too, tiny freezing tears pelting them, and it’s going to get worse when they start moving again. Maggie can barely reason, her brain freezing. She wonders when they’ll all start seeing and hearing things. Landry wouldn’t let Maggie or even Marcus examine his wounds, but he took some of the moleskin, gauze, and butterfly closures from her HART kit, as well as some Wound Wipes and Tribiotic from the MyFAK. He dry-chewed a handful of Cetafen and Proprinal, but didn’t take all of it, figuring he’ll need more later, or one of them will.
He holds up a second dart they pulled from Luna’s clothes, an ugly wasplike stinger with blood-colored fletching. The tiny microfiber feathers are hot and bright against the cold and snowy backdrop, impossible to ignore. This one somehow never burrowed its way through Maggie’s borrowed merino, stopping millimeters from Luna’s skin.
“What do you know about this?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she answers truthfully.
“They clearly still want Maggie alive, Walton,” Sheriff Austin—Marcus—says from over her shoulder. Earlier, he’d taken up a position a little ways off, but now he’s returned to their little redoubt. He kneels and exchanges Landry his wicked-looking rifle for the dart, turning it over in his gloved fingers. “Graham said Maggie was cooperating with the FBI, against the interests of some very dangerous men. He was there to bring her in safe.” He holds up the dart. “Willing or not, apparently.”
Landry snorts. “Looks to me like your Graham was one of those dangerous men. A wolf in sheep’s clothes.”
Marcus says, “Hey, fuck you. He isn’t my anything. The man had a badge and creds. I had no reason to assume he wasn’t who he said he was, and least he was telling me something.” Marcus points at both Maggie and Walton. “If you’d been honest with me from the jump, we might not be in this mess.”
“You’d have handled it then?” Landry fires back.
“We wouldn’t have gotten Donnie killed . . . I can tell you that. And we did, Walton. We did.” Marcus looks like he’s going to throw the dart out into the snow but thinks better of it. Instead, he tosses it back to Landry. “We both got to own that, however long we have left.”
Maggie can see the pain in his eyes, the anger. She says, “And we can’t do this now. Either of you.”
“But he ain’t wrong, though,” Landry says. “We gotta own it.”
“I could say the same thing too,” Maggie concedes.
Marcus nods. “Then we all have debts to pay to that fucker Graham.”
Landry lets that settle between them before he hands the rifle back to Marcus and turns back to her. “Remember when we talked up in Kell’s room, I told you the best way to cross over the mountain? That’s what you and Marcus and the girl here are gonna do right now. Start heading up that ridgeline.”
“No, wait. What about you?” she asks.
Landry’s already grabbing up some of the things he’s taken out of her pack, as well as the dart. “I’ll be just a few minutes behind. I’ll catch up. Promise. I’m going to thieve us more of that head start I talked about, throw Graham off our scent.”
She doesn’t know if Walton really means the other thing stalking them . . . whatever attacked him outside his cabin.
But it’s Marcus who balks. “Then what, Walton?” He turns to her. “Look, I know you had a plan here, some way to disappear, something better than hiding in a damn cave. Graham believed it and I do too. Whatever it is you had up your sleeve, we need to know about it, and we need to know it now.”
Landry looks at her. He’s trying to hide it, but he winces in pain. “He’s not wrong about that either, Maggie. Moment of truth here. And we’re running out of moments.”
She takes the Tracker blade she’s been holding and clips it horizontal to the belt at the small of her back, the same way Landry carried his own. It’s like a heavy but gentle hand, pushing her forward.
“Lost Hill,” she says. “I was going to Lost Hill.”
50
Once Maggie and the others are out of sight, Walton does his best to clear traces of their presence from the cemetery.
The snow blurring down will do its work, too, sow confusion if nothing else, but he knows it’s largely a futile gesture. If Graham is determined, Walton’s stealing them moments at best, and like he told Maggie, they’re fast running out of those.
Walton can’t remember the last time he came up here and sat with these old gravestones, certainly not since Kell disappeared. When Walton was young, and his great-grandfather Cooper was alive, he’d bring Walton here in the summer, when the trees were so green they were black, and they’d sit among these markers, and Coop would drink some clear shine and whittle and share an apple with Walton and fill his head full of stories.
Coop told Walton not to be scared, not up here. His kin’s blood and bones and spirits were in this place, soaked through and through, and it was sacred in a way. Protected here in the heart of this widening circle of gray rocks and toppled monuments, at least for a little while.
That’s why he was comfortable hunkering down here with the others, at least for a little while too. But unless his dead ancestors were ready to rise out of the cold ground here and help them, they couldn’t stay here forever. This place isn’t sacred or powerful enough to ward off Graham and his men, not their darts, nor their bullets. Not forever.
In the end, the mountain itself also proved too much for his own boy, who spent many of his summers in this cemetery, too, with Walton.
If his son is still up here somewhere, he’s not lying peaceful in one of these graves.
About fifty yards west of the old graveyard, Walton finds a spot on the lee side of a pitch pine and tosses down an unopened Cetafen pack.
Another fifty yards from that, he drops the dart he took off the girl. He waits as falling snow drifts over it, until only the red fletching remains. When that’s gone, too, he zigzags westward again, cutting through more pitch and white pine, snapping branches as he goes.
He’s moving down now, toward Alpena Gap, or at least that’s what anyone with a GPS would assume. From the Gap you can pick up a fair number of hiking and logging roads, and eventually make your way to US Route 33. It’s a reasonable path off the mountain, if that’s what you’re trying to do.
Deep beneath the trees now, Walton finds the small pond he was searching for, frozen over now, a slick, beautiful unblemished surface, so white it almost hurts the eye. In summer this is little more than a thumbprint in the mountain, a mossy wellspring of cave water.
He and Kellan swam here now and then, fiery sun on their backs, dappled angel light through the trees, the water so cold and fresh and clear it made their teeth ache. Kell found Indian points below the surface, bones too. Most graves on Black Mountain aren’t marked by headstones.
Walton hunkers down and slowly starts working free one of the butterfly bandages from his wounds.
He took a beating from that . . . thing . . . worse than he wanted to let on to either Maggie or Marcus. Despite the cold, he’s still bleeding bad, like the proverbial stuck pig. His core temperature’s dropping fast, too, so he’ll just as likely freeze to death before these wounds kill him or a clot stops his heart.
Even in the cold, the stink of chilly blood will carry far.
He sticks the stained bandage to a pine and lets it wave there like a tiny, crimson flag.
He then unsheathes his Jackal Pup and crouches as quietly as he can, watching the snow-flecked woods. His little blade’s not got anywhere near the heft or length of Maggie’s, but it did the trick before. It’ll do it again.
But as sure as he was that the thing tracked him away from the cabin, he’s not so sure it followed him down from the cemetery. It called out for Luna before, certainly seems drawn to her, but of the four of them, he’s the most wounded, the easiest kill, if this man or thing reasons that way. If nothing else, Walton is also the one who hurt it, hurt it bad, and even animals remember that. Sometimes, anger and vengeance are enough.
Either he’s lured it away or he hasn’t, but he’s also given Graham and his men a merry trail to follow, if they’re smart enough to look, and Walton’s betting they are.
A trail far from Lost Hill.
He fights to keep his eyes open, tries not to shake and rattle from the cold. You lose body heat about twenty-five times faster in water than in the air. If he cracked the ice on the pond and slipped in, he’d be dead in twenty minutes or less. If he doesn’t get moving soon, get his heart and blood flowing again, he’ll still be dead in an hour.
It’s going to get bad for the others soon too. He didn’t want to tell them just how bad.
But still, he waits.
Cold. Patient. Dying.
Kell could sit up in a hunting blind or deer stand for days like this, mostly just watching the world go by. He’d pass up good shot after good shot, one excuse after another, so as not to pull the trigger, not rush the moment. His boy was infinitely patient; seemingly the only thing he was ever eager to get away from was Walton.
Oh, Kell, I hear birds coming to carry me away . . .
He doesn’t know what that means, but he likes it.
Walton watches the storm breathe in and out all around him until he can’t feel the knife in his hand or even his hands or feet at all and each breath is like broken glass in his chest, piercing his heart.
51
She likes the new man, Marcus.
He doesn’t say much to her, just keeps a hand on her shoulder or small of her back, helping her along, willing to touch her in a way the old man wouldn’t.
Marcus and Maggie don’t talk much, but they constantly check on each other. Maggie is up ahead, leading the way, and often slows and stops and looks back and waits.
She can feel all the unspoken thoughts and fears and unanswered questions between the two winging their way over her head, a feathered flurry of dread and worry.
Marcus’s thoughts are angrier, a constant war of dark sparks and flickers inside him. The cold can’t do anything to cool or calm that down. Maggie’s emotions are naturally chillier. But below that ice, black things lurk and move.
Neither expects to live long, but neither fears it, and she wonders at that. When the plane went down, she nearly exploded with anger and fear, not just her own, but from all those around her.
She couldn’t take it all in.
When she’s scared or hurt, when she can’t cage her own dark birds or keep everyone else’s at bay and out of her mind, she lashes out, just like she did on the plane, like she did again at the cabin. And when that happens, all of Dr. Jewell’s techniques aren’t enough to hold back the murmuration in her head. Dr. Jewell once told her maybe nothing in the world can.
The old man is too far away for her, as are the others from the cabin, those who survived. When she woke up from being drugged—not the first time for her—Roach’s frantic thoughts were just taking flight again, too, but now he’s either too far away or he’s mastered masking them. He was never very good at it before, but it’s not just him, it’s this place too.
The mountain.
All around her, heavy, weighing at her, pulling her down.
Not just that bat-winged presence from before, but more than that. Not alive in any way she can understand, but not necessarily dead either. More like an old house, haunted by a hundred ghosts, a thousand spirits, and the spirits on this mountain don’t fear anything.
She wants to be more like Maggie and Marcus.
She wants to be more like the mountain.
52
“Tell me,” Ekker says, “how they get off this mountain.”
Martin Feiser, loudly chewing peppermint gum, spins the tablet around on his lap, starts pointing out roads and trails and campgrounds on the brightly illuminated screen. “Not easily, and not fast,” he says. “Maybe never if they’re on foot.”
Ekker watches fresh snow collect on Feiser’s windshield, the world beyond as white as TV static. Outside, he was barely able to see his hand in front of his face. “Assume they are.”
Feiser taps at his tablet, and Ekker glances back at Bisek, staring wordlessly out the windshield, hands folded in his lap like a child. They’ve moved over to Feiser’s SUV, stifling since Feiser never left it during the raid and he’s had the heater blowing for hours. It’s one of the two Ekker’s team positioned in the woods near Landry’s cabin before the shooting started. The other is supplied with more practical, tactical gear, but this one is like Feiser’s personal lair, fetid and cloying like the man himself, full of his laptops and tablets and his mobile comms array and Wi-Fi network.
Feiser taps again, here, here, here.
“They’re going to want to find major blacktop if they can,” Feiser explains. “Best chance to get help, right? That’s US Route 33, same way we got to The Hills Have Eyes up here. But . . . there are dozens of trails and logging and forestry roads they could take. This mapping software is as up to date as you’ll find, but we’re still in a maze. State Road 91 will take you up to Bickle Knob; all these other little county roads wind you around to campgrounds or whatever. If they do go to ground, hole up somewhere, the only towns of any size they could reasonably make for are”—Feiser squints, pops his gum—“Bowden, Wymer, Alpena Gap. Harman.”
“The largest of those?”
“Harman.” Feiser pops again. “Population 143.”
“Did you run geospatial?” Ekker asks. “Can you give me a search grid based on foot speed?”
“I ran everything,” Feiser says, “but it’s a statistical mess. The inputs are thin. We’re not sure if they’re all still together, or even still alive. This storm dirties up the data so bad the algorithm is merely guessing, which, you know, fucks the whole data and metrics thing—”
