The Hunger(90)

Now, his mind raced, his blood flowed too fast in his veins. He strove for breath as he fumbled for his rifle on his back. Where was his rifle?

It had never been a pack of diseased wolves preying on them, attacking the cattle, looming in the tree line. Had it?

It had always been . . . these things.

No. No. He was coming unhinged. He slowed and looked back at the trees, squinted.

The shadows darted and lunged, morphed into the snowy night.

Where was his rifle?

Then he remembered he had propped it against the trunk of a tree at the edge of the woods. He would have to sprint to reach it. The snow here was over his knees now; the darkness had come.

He threw his weight into each step. Don’t look back, just go. His blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it: a wet kind of panting, a ragged excitement, as if whatever was pursuing him had to breathe through thick, damp rot.

Closer. Closing in on him.

Whatever had attacked him, whatever he’d seen, it was real. They were real.

I’m sorry. He didn’t know what for—for not believing the tales Tamsen had spread through the party? For not protecting them?

For a life wasted not in sin, not really, but in the strangling belief of sin?

He could see the rifle now, and beyond it a thin trail of smoke, the beginnings of a campfire. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him.

He was only feet from the rifle when the thing sprang. He felt the swipe of something sharp and painful on his calf; it felt as if someone had pressed a red-hot brand to his flesh. Then burning pain in his right calf, too, and he was wallowing in the snow like a baby. He tried to crawl forward on his hands and knees, but something had his legs and was dragging him backward. Another slash to the back of his head, the pain so intense he saw white flashes.

He could not die this way.

Not now.

Not yet.

His fingers grazed the very end of the rifle stock. Slipped. But the thing had him now, had a mouth around his ankle—Stanton gasped in terror as he saw human eyes, a human nose . . .

Whatever it was, it had been a human once.

And yet it was not human now, this creature. Its teeth weren’t human; Stanton felt them hook deep beneath his skin, down into the muscle, and something wet and terrible probing between them that he knew must be a tongue.

He kicked the thing once, hard, in the face. It didn’t let go, but for a moment he had a little more room and, twisting, he got a hand around the gun.

He rolled again onto his back and brought the rifle to his chest, firing directly at the eyes.

The monster released him. Stanton didn’t wait to see if it was dead. He struggled to his feet, and the pain when he put weight on his right leg blacked his vision. There were more of them, massing in the trees. He fired again, blindly, not sure whether he was aiming at the shadows. He stood there shaking and bleeding into the snow, and saw them regrouping, flowing into a dark fluid mass. He lifted his rifle again when a sudden movement made him turn: One of them had sprung at him from the left, had ambushed him, and before he could aim it was on top of him, driving him backward into the snow and knocking the rifle from his hands.

It smelled like a corpse left too long in the heat. But its fingers were cold, and slimy, and wet—rotten. He choked on the smell. He tried to throw it off but he was pinned and too weak to fight. Its mouth seemed to double, its jaw unhinging like that of a snake. He saw teeth sharpened like iron nails, and too many of them, far too many—a long slick of throat, like a dark tunnel, and that horrible tongue slapping like a blind animal feeling for its prey.

Then an explosion split his forehead in two. The thing recoiled—Stanton tasted vomit—it scuttled backward, half its face hanging like a broken shutter. It moved. It was alive.

There was shouting. Mary was at his side, knees down in the snow, tugging him. Crying and screaming. “Why did you leave us? You know it’s not safe. What were you thinking? Why did you leave?”

William Eddy was right behind him, holding a smoking rifle. But his eyes were fixed on Stanton’s leg, and his expression didn’t lie.

“Pretty bad, huh?” Stanton asked. “The monsters got me.” It sprang from his mouth before he realized how crazy it sounded.

Was it crazy?

Maybe that was the curse of these mountains—they turned you mad, then reflected your own madness back at you, incarnate.

Like some sort of biblical punishment.

Mary kept hold of his arm, as though he might get up, climb to his feet, and walk away.

Stanton could feel the disease as it entered him, the shiver of something dark and slick and alien in his veins, so cold that it burned. How long would it take, he wondered, for him to turn? Several days? A week? He would be dead by then, at least, frozen to death or consumed by the monsters when they returned.

And even if it hadn’t been the disease—it didn’t matter now. As injured as he was, they’d never get him back to camp, or close enough to the ranch to get help.

“Go,” he said to Mary. “Run. There are more. They’ll be here any minute.”

“I can’t leave you,” she said.

Did she believe him? Could she possibly understand? It was too cold to cry, but even in the dim light from the distant fire—they had gotten it burning, after all—her pain was visible. There was no part of her face it didn’t touch.

“You have to.” He looked to Eddy. The urgency and horror still swam inside him, making him dizzy, sick. He had to rest his head . . . “Go. Get as far from here as you can.”