The Hunger(89)

Stanton had grown old in a week. He was dazzled by snow, sunblind and sore—a vast, unending series of heights and valleys, all of it made identical beneath a blanket of white. They walked ten hours a day, by his estimate, but only seemed to make a few miles. They would need over a month to reach help.

They had rations for five days, and so had begun eating only at night.

Mary kept track of the days by knotting a length of string, a long brown thread pulled from the hem of her skirt, and each knot seemed to tie down something fluttering inside Stanton’s chest—some tiny part of him that still awoke to the idea of love. He was amazed she could make the knots at all, that her fingers could still bend when his, brittle, blackened by frostbite, were often useless even after he’d warmed them by the fire.

Evenings he gathered wood, compelled through his exhaustion by a stubborn animal force that wanted him to live. They slept sitting up, hunched by an open fire, when they could sleep at all. Charles, Eddy, Franklin Graves, and Jay Fosdick took turns standing watch at night, though Graves was failing quickly and sometimes could hardly be roused in the morning.

Usually, the fire melted out a hole beneath itself. By morning, the snowshoe party would lie encased at the bottom of a pit six or more feet deep, and the climb to the surface of steep white walls used energy they could little afford to waste. Stanton feared the day when one of them would be too weak to make the climb.

For days they had had no sign of the wolves—or beasts of any kind.

But as they began to weaken, Stanton sensed a change. He began to hear noises in the woods—whispers, the hiss of quick-footed movement through dead trees. He knew how predators tailed injured animals, dying animals, and waited for them to falter. The snowshoe party was dying, slowly but surely, and the diseased wolves had picked up the scent.

Another day of darkness transmuted into a landscape of dazzling white: Stanton welcomed the night, if only because he could rest his eyes. Often he felt as if they were bleeding, or as if someone were tickling them with a knife; when Eddy had lost his vision altogether temporarily, he had had to walk with one hand on Stanton’s belt.

Mary collapsed next to him. They huddled together under the same filthy blanket, though it did little good. It seemed he was always wet, always cold, always hungry.

Her face was sunburnt, her nose raw and peeling. She reached into her pocket and brought out a strip of dried beef. “Your dinner.” She always said that, dinner, though it was his only meal of the day. “Eat slowly.”

“How much is left?” It hurt to eat. His stomach recoiled and grasped all at once. His teeth sang with the cold, and the slow decay of too long with too little. “Enough for how many days?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think about it, not now. We’ll find something.”

The sky was darkening fast, but the fire wouldn’t catch; the wood was wet. Eddy took his turn with the flint, then Stanton, and then Jay. Stanton stood back and saw the sun pooling behind the mountains, saw daylight pouring, melting away, and his exhaustion turned to a primal kind of fear.

“Take the ax,” he told Jay. “Get a tree down. Get branches down, get something down.” He went toward the woods at nearly a sprint, despite the clutching pressure of the snow. He had thought an hour ago he could not walk another step, but now he was electric with fear; without fire, they had no chance. They’d freeze in their sleep. And fire seemed to keep the wolves, or whatever was following them, at bay.

The thwack of the ax head rang through the hollow. Slow, though—too slow. Even if Jay could fell a tree they would never split the wood in time. Stanton plunged into the deep shadows of a stand of solemn, stooped evergreens. He ducked beneath the branches to feel for wood dry enough to burn; he found twigs, kindling, nothing they could use for any length of time. He kept going, losing sight of the camp, desperate, half mad—from the snow, the endless climb, the hunger, the pointlessness of a fight they kept fighting.

Beneath a massive pine he found some wood largely protected from the weather by the funnel of branches above them. He collected as much as he could; it would last them an hour, maybe more, long enough for Jay to split some wood from a tree.

He had turned back to camp when, from the corner of his eye, he saw movement. Fast, like a wolf running between the trees.

But they were not wolves.

Another shadow, another dark thing moved fast between the trees.

He dropped the wood in the snow, keeping hold only of a stub of pine. He struck his flint against it. Catch, damn you. Sparks flew harmlessly into the snow. His fingers were clumsy, frozen stiff. He almost dropped the flint but managed to grab it at the last second.

He heard the thing behind him only seconds before it would have jawed his neck.

He turned blindly, swinging the branch like a club. Heard it connect, saw the dark and twisted thing, half man and half beast, fall back between the trees.

A kind of demon. A monster.

There was no other word for it.

Stanton ran—or as close to it as he could in the knee-high snow. Sweat poured down his face, instantly freezing in place, pulling at his cheeks, forcing his mouth into a grimace.

Panic surged through him, mingling with disbelief.

Tamsen had been right.

The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.